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Lesson 1: Introduction
1.1
What is grammar?
Grammar is the system of a language, by which words are formed and put together
to make sentences. To put it more academically, grammar is the study of the
internal structure of words (morphology ) and the use of words in the
construction of phrases and sentences (syntax ).
It is not the rules of a language because we dont start with grammar first, and
then the language. We start with the language first, and then we figure out the
grammar (the system) of that language. Languages were started by people making
sounds which evolved into words, phrases and sentences. And all languages change
over time. So grammar as a reflection of a language at a particular time, also
changes over time.
(Morphology is a big word, like syntax, that tends to scare off students. What it is,
the internal structure and changes of words, is of things you all are quite familiar
with already. Eg.
use - useless, useful, (affixes prefix, suffix)
like - dislike, likeable,
depend in-depend-ent, dependent-ly
dog dogs (inflection) number (singular vs. plural)
fish fishes
time timetable (word formation by compounding)
dish dishwasher
go went gone (tenses)
do did done
cut cut cut
Chinese (capital letter for proper nouns)
1
1.4.6 The subject is one of the two main parts (subject and predicate) of a sentence;
the subject is the part that is not the predicate; typically, the subject is the
first noun or noun phrase in a sentence and is what the rest of the sentence
"is about."
eg: "The drinking water was dirty", "Julie is beautiful", "Who saw you?"
1.4.7 The predicate is the other one of the two main parts of a sentence; the predicate
is the part that is not the subject, and this part usually consists of a verb with
or without objects, complements, or adverbial modifiers.
eg: "She is a dentist," "Who did you call?", "The girl wearing a yellow
dress helped me."
* There are in total 10 such sentence patterns in English grammar. See Lesson 14 for
details.
1.5 The 8 Parts of Speech
Sentences are composed of words, and there are thousands of them. All words serve
some kind of purpose, and have different functions. For example, some words
express action, which are called verbs; others name things, and are called
nouns. Still other words are used to join one word to another word, and they are
called conjunctions. These are the building blocks of the language. When we
want to build a sentence, we use the different types of word. Each type has its own
function.
In English, there are 8 basic types of words. So all English words* are classified into
these 8 types, which we call them the 8 parts of speech. They are:
part of
speech
function or job
example words
example sentences
Verb
action or state
Noun
This is my dog. He
lives in my house. We
live in Hong Kong.
Adjective
describes a noun
Adverb
describes a verb,
adjective or adverb
quickly, silently,
well, badly, very,
really
Pronoun
replaces a noun
Preposition
We went to school on
Monday.
Conjunction
Interjection
short exclamation,
sometimes inserted into a
sentence
verb
noun
verb
noun
verb
verb
Stop!
John
works.
John
is
working.
pronoun
verb
noun
noun
verb
adjective
noun
She
loves
animals.
Animals
like
kind
people.
noun
verb
noun
adverb
noun
verb
adjective
noun
Tara
speaks
English
well.
Tara
speaks
good
English.
pronoun
verb
preposition
adjective
noun
adverb
She
ran
to
the
station
quickly.
pron.
verb
adj.
noun
conjunction
pron.
verb
pron.
She
likes
big
snakes
but
hate
them.
interjection
pron.
conj.
adj.
noun
verb
prep.
noun
adverb
Well,
she
and
young
John
walk
to
school
slowly.
- a joint Harvard/Google study (December 2010) found 1,022,000 English words, and
the number expands at the rate of 8,500 words per year.
In comparison, German has 184,000 words, and French, 100,000 words (Bill Bryson, The
Mother Tongue, p. 13).
And the total number of Chinese characters through history is shown as below:
-