Written Exp_ 1st Yea ...

1. A lexical entry is an entry for a particular word in a dictionary (and hence by extension refers to the set of information about the word given in the relevant dictionary entry).

and can stand on its own as a sentence. A subordinate clause needs to be attached to a main clause to be grammatically complete. One kind of subordinate clause, the relative clause, usually starts with a relative pronoun such as who, which, that, where.

1. An utterance which is not a complete sentence (in the sense that it does not constitute a clause). So, a phrase such as ‘A new dress’ used in reply to a question such as ‘What did you buy?’ would be a sentence-fragment (By contrast, a sentence such as ‘I bought a new dress’ would not be a sentencefragment, since it contains a complete clause.)

Expressions such as subject, specifier, complement, object, head and adjunct are said to denote the grammatical function which a particular expression fulfils in a particular structure (which in turn relates to the position  which it occupies and certain of its grammatical properties – e.g. case and agreement properties).

When used in conjunction with the progressive aspect auxiliary be, verb forms ending in -ing are progressive participles; in other uses they generally function as gerunds. In particular, -ing verb forms are gerunds when they can be used as subjects, or as complements of verbs or prepositions, and when (in literary styles) they can have a genitive subject  like my. Thus writing is a gerund (verb form) in a sentence such as ‘She was annoyed at [my writing to her mother]’, since the bracketed gerund structure is used as the complement of the preposition at, and has a genitive subject my.

The infinitive form of a verb is the (uninflected) form which is used (inter alia) when the verb is the complement of a modal auxiliary like can, or of the infinitive particle to. Accordingly, the italicised verbs are infinitive forms in sentences like ‘He can speak French’, and ‘He’s trying to learn French.’ An infinitive clause is a clause which contains a verb in the infinitive form. Hence, the bracketed clauses are infinitive clauses in: ‘He is trying [to help her]’, and ‘Why not let [him help her]?’ (In both examples, help is an infinitive verb form, and to when used with an infinitive complement is said to be an infinitive particle.) Since clauses are analysed as phrases within the  framework used here, the term infinitive phrase can be used interchangeably with infinitive clause, to denote a TP projection headed by the infinitive particle to (or by a null counterpart of the infinitive particle to).

1. In an expression such as tall men, it is traditionally said that the adjective tall modifies (i.e. attributes some property to) or is a modifier of the noun men. Likewise, in a sentence such as ‘Eat slowly!’, the adverb slowly is said to modify the verb eat (in the sense that it describes the manner in which the speaker is being told to eat).

nouns are hard to define. You may have heard them described as ‘names’ (e.g.

Shân, Joanna, language, or cat), but they can also refer to abstract concepts such as

emptiness, joy, and age. However, many words more usually thought of as verbs, or

even as adverbs or adjectives, can be used as nouns, and it is its syntactic behaviour

which makes a word a noun rather than anything else. Nouns can usually be singular or

plural, they can be modified by adjectives and they can be preceded by determiners.

For example, in the sentence ‘Have you read a good book?’, a is a determiner, good is an

adjective, and book is a noun. Similarly, in the sentence ‘Did you have a good swim?’,

swim is a noun, although in a different sentence it could be used as a verb (‘I swim

every Monday’).

a grammatical unit built around a noun. For example, car, the car, and the

red car are all noun phrases. See page 64.

a constituent of a clause, which is part of the predicate and follows the main

verb. In the sentence I ate the chocolate bar, I is the subject, ate is the main verb, and

the chocolate bar is the object.