ESL Glossary: definitions of grammatical and semantical terms

	home stories directory grammar directory annex directory tesl directory		flesl.net grammar glossary (m-z)

	Grammar Glossary (m-z) main verb • The "main verb" is the final verb in a verb phrase and the one that gives the phrase its meaning. • The main verb is the only verb in the verb phrase if the verb phrase is "simple" as, for example, in "Jack and Jill work hard. If the verb phrase is "compound," then the main verb is the final verb and any other verbs will be auxiliaries. For example, in "Jack and Jill have been working hard," "working" is the main verb and "have" and "been" are auxiliaries. modal auxiliary The "modal auxiliaries" are: - "can," "could," - "will," 'would," - "shall," "should," - "might," "may," "must" • These verbs can never be the "main verb" of a "verb phrase." They work with other verbs in verb phrases such as "must eat" or "will be sleeping." Unlike the "standard" auxiliary verbs, "do," "have," and "be" they can never be used by themselves as "main verbs." • The modal auxiliaries also differ from the standard auxiliaries in that, although they cannot be used alone, they do have their own meaning. (When they are used as auxiliaries, "do," "have" and "be" have no meaning at all; they have an entirely grammatical function.) • Generally speaking the modal auxiliaries "express" degrees of probability, possibility, advisability, and obligation. For example, "Jane should go to a doctor," means that it is advisable for her to go and "Jane must tell Harry the truth" means that she is obliged to tell him the truth, that it would be wrong for her not to do so. • Modal auxiliaries are important to ESL teachers and their students. In the first place, each of them has several meanings and, in the second place there are various grammatical complications in their use — for example, concerning how they are to be put into the past, and how their positive and negative meanings are related.) Moreover, one of the most common chronic (or "fossilized") errors is using a to infinitve after a modal, as in ¿"Jack told Jill, 'I must to go now.'"¿ modify • Adjectives "modify" nouns. Adverbs "modify" verbs. In other words, they change their meanings slightly by making them more exact. (As well as being a techincal term in grammar, the word "modify" is an ordinary English word with a meaning similar to "change." For example, "Jack and Jill modified their plans," has approximately the same meaning as "Jack and Jill changed their plans.") • As well as one-word adjectives, adjective clauses can modify nouns. For example, in the sentence, "Jack showed Jill an old book that his grandmother had given him," both the one-word adjective "old" and the adjective clause "that his grandmother had given him," modify the noun, "book." •Similarly, as well as one-word adverbs, adverbial clauses can modify verbs. For example, in the sentence, "Jill smiled happily when Jack showed her a photo of him sitting on his grandmother's knee," both the one-word adverb "happily" and the adverbial clause, "when Jack showed her a photo of him sitting on his grandmother's knee," modify the verb "smiled." morpheme • A morpheme is a "unit of meaning" which cannot be broken down (or "analyzed") into other units of meaning. For example, the word "dog" is just one morpheme because its meaning cannot be broken down into parts, but the word "dogs" contains two morphemes because its meaning can be broken down into two parts, the "dog-morpheme" and the "plural-morpheme," "s," which is added to "dog" in order to create a plural noun. Similarly, the word "happy" is one morpheme, but the word "unhappy" has two because the prefix "un" has its own meaning and is therefore a separate morpheme. (The SUPERLATIVE form of "unhappy," "unhappiest," made by adding the superlative SUFFIX, "est," has three morphemes.) noun • Nouns make up one of the eight English word classes. • From a SEMANTIC point of view, nouns are names of "things" — PHYSICAL things like cups and pens, MENTAL things like thoughts and feelings, and ABSTRACT things like love and beauty. • Defined from a GRAMMATICAL point of view, nouns are words that act as headwords in a certain type of grammatical structure called a "noun phrase." As the headwords of noun phrases, nouns have several distinctive grammatical qualities: they can be modified by adjectives; they have PLURAL and SINGULAR forms; often, they must be preceded by a NOUN INTRODUCER such as an ARTICLE, a QUANTIFIER, or a NUMERAL. • Sometimes the grammatical definition of "noun" takes priority over the semantic definition resulting in nouns which are not really the names of "things." The noun "hurry" as it is used in the phrase, "in a hurry" is a good example: there is no "thing" called "a hurry"; the noun has just been "invented" to create an alternative way of saying something that would normally be said with the VERB "hurry." • There are two basic types of noun: COUNT NOUNS such as "sugar"and "happiness" and NON-COUNT NOUNS such as "pencil" and "event." And there is a third important category: PROPER NAMES such as "Tom," "Dick," and "Harry." • In addition to being the headwords as noun phrases, nouns do another important job as NOUN MODIFIERS of other nouns as, for example, in the noun phrase, " a white cotton t-shirt." Here the headword "t-shirt" is MODIFIED by the ADJECTIVE "white" and the noun modifier "cotton." noun modifier • A noun modifier is a noun that is used to modify another noun. For example, in the sentence, "Jack and Jill spent their holidays in a mountain village," the word, "mountain" is a noun modifier, modifying the noun "village." • Noun modifiers do the same job as adjectives do, but they are not adjectives. One sign of this is the fact that they cannot be modified by adverbs in the way adjectives can. For example, we cannot say, XX"Jack and Jill spent their holidays in a very mountain village"XX but if we add the adjective, "pretty" we can say "Jack and Jill spent their vacation in a very pretty mountain village." • Another characteristic of noun modifiers is that,if they are used with an adjective they must always be put between the adjective and the modified noun. • Often, two or more noun modifiers can be used to modify one noun as in the phrase "dog training course" as used in the sentence, "Jack and Jill met each other in a dog training course." • Like adjectives, noun modifiers are never plural. For example, the plural of the phrase "city center" is "city centers." noun phrase: • A noun phrase is a grammatical group of words which centers on a "main noun." This main noun is called the "headword." In the noun phrase "a horse," the headword is "horse." "Horse" is also the headword in the noun phrase, "a tired old horse ridden by a fat,ugly man." • Normally, we think of a "phrase" as a group of two or more words, but speaking strictly, in a grammatical context, a phrase can contain only one word. For example, the object of the sentence, "Harry just bought another race horse," is the noun phrase, "another race horse"; and the object of the sentence, "Harry loves horses," is the noun phrase "horse." numeral A "numeral" is a "number" word like "one," "two," "six," or "thirty-seven." There is another group of number words, the "ordinals" — words like "first," "second," "sixth," and "thirty-seventh." object • The object is one of the five sentence/clause parts which make up all English sentences. • Semantically, an object can be defined as the sentence/clause part which names the "thing" that "receives" the "action" . Or, to put the same thing in a different way, we can say that the object of a sentence or clause is the thing that "is acted upon." • Grammatically, an object can be defined in terms of its location in a sentence or clause. In a normal, active sentence or clause, the object comes immediately after the verb phrase . (Passive sentence/clauses cannot have objects because, there, the "recipient" is named in the subject. • Objects can be nouns as in "Dick believed Jane, " noun phrases as in "Dick believed the story Jane told him" or noun clauses as in "Dick believed that Jane had gone to visit her sister." ordinal An "ordinal" is a "number" word like "first," "second," "sixth," and "thirty-seventh." There is another group of number words, the "numerals" — words like "one," "two," "six," or "thirty-seven." participial adjectives •• "Participial adjectives" are adjectives which have the same endings as the past participle or the present participle of verb forms. •There are two main types: "active participial adjectives," which have the "-ing" ending of present participles, and "passive participial adjectives," which have the same ending as the past participle form of the associated verb. • (Passive participial adjectives end in "ed" if the verb they are "associated with" is a regular verb; if the associated verb is an irregular verb, they have the same ending as the past participle as that verb. For example, the passive participial adjective associated with the verb "excite" is "excited" and the passive participial associated with the verb "see" is "seen." ) ••Participial adjectives are important to ESL students and their teachers because they are the source of many mistakes. These mistakes are particularly common with the many participial adjectives associated with verbs used to describe feelings. (For example, the verbs "excite," "frighten," and "interest.") The key to reducing the number of mistakes made with these participial adjective is to explain: (a) that the active forms refer to the cause of the feeling and the passive forms refer to the person who is having the feeling — for example, an "exciting teacher" is a teacher whose teaching creates a feeling of excitement in her students; an "excited teacher" is one who feels excitement herself (b) to provide large amounts of practice aimed at creating a habit of using participial adjectives correctly. (This practice should include at least some verbal drilling and some error detection.) • There are some participial adjectives which are not associated with a verb; "talented" and "self-centered" are examples. (There is no such verb as "to talent" or "to self-center.") Participial adjectives of this kind only have passive forms. (There is no such word as "talenting," for example.) passive voice • Verb phrases are either in the active voice or the "passive voice." • If a transitive verb phrase is in the active voice, it is followed by an object. • for more information see active voice/passive voice past continuous * The past continuous is one of the eight English verb tenses. It is formed by using the past tense of the verb "be" as an auxiliary verb and putting the main verb into the "ing"-form. •The most important use of the past continuous is in sentences like this: "Tom was travelling in Egypt when the earthquake occurred in Italy." In such sentences, the past continuous is used to refer to a "long event" (Tom's travelling, for example) and the simple past is used to refer to a "short event" (the earthquake, for example) that happens "inside" the larger one. past participle • The past participle is one of the five verb forms. In regular verbs the past participle is the same as the "past form" and is formed by adding "ed" to the "base form." In irregular verbs, the past participle is formed in some other way. (For example, the past participle of "see" is "seen" and the past participle of "swim" is "swum.") • The past participle is used in forming the four "perfect" verb tenses, and in forming the passive voice. (For example: "I have seen that movie six times" and "That movie has been seen by millions of people all over the world.") • The past participle is also used in forming "passive participial adjectives," for example, "a broken nose," "a stolen car." plural •"plural" means "more than one." • in English grammar "plural" is used in referring to "plural nouns." • most English "count nouns" form their plural by adding "s." ("Dogs" and "cats," for example.) There are a few "irregular" plurals such as "men" (the plural of "man") and "mice" (the plural of "mouse"). • non-count nouns such as "love" and "water" do not have a plural form. phrasal verb • Phrasal verbs are a type of multi-word verb. They are made up of a verb plus an adverb. Although phrasal verbs are made up of two words, they have one meaning in the same way that ordinary one-word verbs have one meaning. For example, in the sentence,"Sarah put on her new sweater" the phrasal verb, "put on" has meaning in just the same way as the one-word verb, "put" has meaning in the sentence, "Sarah put her sweater in a drawer." • Some phrasal verbs are strictly intransitive, for example "sleep in" in a sentence like: "On Sunday, Dick and Jane always sleep in till noon." Most phrasal verbs, however, are transitive. These verbs are divided into two categories separable and inseparable. • An example of a separable phrasal verb is "clean up," as used in the sentence, "Dick told Jane that he would cook supper if she would clean up the mess in the kitchen." They are "separable" because, if their direct object is a pronoun, it must be placed between the verb and the adverb that make up the phrasal verb as in, "Jane said, "Why don't you clean it up and then I'll cook supper." •This does not happen with inseparable phrasal verbs. For example, when using the the phrasal verb "go over," whether it is a noun or a pronoun, the object must follow the adverb. (For example, "Sarah asked Harry to go over the report with her," and "Harry said that he didn't have time to go over it until the next day.") • The adverbs in phrasal verbs are often, incorrectly, called prepositions. This confusion is caused by the fact that many words — "in," "on," and "through," for example — can be used both as prepositions and as adverbs. (In the sentence, "Harry decided to carry on working even though his doctor told him he shouldn't," "on" is an adverb in a phrasal verb, but in the sentence "Harry knew he could rely on Sarah to do the work while he was in the hospital," "on" is a preposition in a prepositional verb." •One thing that shows that "on" is an adverb in the first sentence, but a preposition in the second: In the second sentence it is possible to insert an adverb between the verb and the following preposition: "Harry knew that he could rely completely on Sarah to do the work while he was in the hospital," but this cannot be done in the first sentence. For example: ¿¿"Harry decided to carry quietly on working even though his doctor told him he shouldn't"?? is not correct English. The reason the adverb can be inserted in the second sentence is that, being an preposition, "on" in the second sentence is more closely connected to the noun phrase that follows it than it is to the verb that precedes it, whereas in the first sentence, being an adverb, "on" is more closely connected to the verb and cannot therefore correctly be separated from it. phrase • A phrase is a group of words which work together as a "grammatical unit" but which do not have a subject/verb structure and which therefore are not clauses. • There are several kinds of phrase: noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and prepositional phrases. physical/mental Physical things are things like tables and chairs that can be seen and touched. Mental things are things like ideas or emotions that exist in people's, and animals' minds. possessive determiners The possessive determiners are the words "my," "your," "his," "her," "our," "their." Like other determiners, they are always immediately followed by a noun. Like other determiners they cannot be used in connection any other determiners except the possessives. In other words, phrases like "this my book" and "her a sweater" are always incorrect. possessive nouns • A "possessive noun" is a noun that has had the suffix (or 'clitic') "'s " (apostrophe + 's') added to it in order to indicate "possession." For example, in "Those are Harry's shoes," the apostrophe + 's' that follows "Harry" indicates that the shoes belong to Harry, that he owns them. Possessive nouns do not always indicate ownership, however. For example, "Harry's office" may be owned by Harry but it may also be owned by the company Harry works for. • The possessive form of nouns that end in "s" may be formed either by adding apostrophe+'s' or by simply adding an apostrophe. (For example: "Dennis's shoes" or "Dennis' shoes.") •Possessive nouns usually refer to people but need not always do so. They can refer to animals as in "the dog's bone," to institutions as in "the school's" property and even,sometimes, to inanimate objects as in "the carpet's colour." prefix A prefix is a "word part" (or morpheme) that is added to the beginning of a word to change that word's meaning. In general, the same prefix can be used to make the same kind of change to the meaning of many words, for example, "unhappy" means "not happy," "unpleasant" means "not pleasant," and "unreadable" means "not readable." Other very common English prefixes are "re," meaning as in "rewrite" meaning "to write again" and in "rebuild" meaning to build again and "ex," meaning "former" or "past" as in "ex-wife" or "ex-president." preposition • Prepositions make up one of the seven word classes of English. "In, "at," "on," and "between" are examples of prepositions. • The most basic use of prepositions is to introduce noun phrases. Typically, when they are used in this way prepositions indicate the "location" of something — where it is, in other words. Sometimes the location is in space as in "Sarah ate lunch on the train"; sometimes it is in time, as in "Sarah's train arrived at 5:30" • There are other prepositions, however, that do not indicate location. For example, in the sentence,"Despite the rain, Dick and Jane went ahead with their plans for a picnic," the preposition "despite" indicates the "logical contrast" between the idea of a picnic and the idea of rain. • Although prepositions make up a word class, there are several important multi-word prepositions such as "according to" in the sentence, "According to Harry Jill is in love with Dick" or "instead of" in the sentence "Harry drank beer instead of his usual whiskey." • There are several important words that are used as conjunctions as well as prepositions. For example, in the sentence "Tom came home after the war had ended," "after" is a conjunction, but in the sentence, "Tom came home after the war," "after" is a preposition. • There are also several important words — such as "over" and "on" — that are used as adverbs as well as prepositions. As adverbs, these words are often used to make phrasal verbs such as "look over" and "carry on," as, for example in: "Jill carefully looked over the document Jack had given her" or "Jack went home to bed, but Jill carried on." When these adverbs are used in this way they are often called "prepositions" but that is incorrect — and can be confusing. • Prepositions have an important secondary use as parts of prepositional verbs such as "listen to" or "arrive at." In a sentence such as "Jack and Jill spent the evening listening to their favorite old songs," the preposition "to" is "working" both as part of the prepositional verb "listen to," and also as an "introduction" the prepositional oject, the noun phrase "their old favorite songs." prepositional object • A prepositional object is the object of a prepositional verb. • For example, in the sentence, "Jack listened to the news," "the news" is the prepositional object of the verb "listen (to)," and in the sentence, "Jill listened to everything Jack had to say," the prepositional object is "everything Jack had to say." • In the case of a ditransitive prepositional verb such as "charge with," the prepositional object follows the direct object. • For example, in the sentence,"The police charged Harry with drunken driving," Harry is the direct object and "drunken driving" is the prepositional object. prepositional phrase A prepositional phrase is a phrase made up of a preposition followed by a noun phrase. For example, in the sentence, "In the morning, Jack took Jill to the top of the hill," "in the morning" and "of the hill" are prepositional phrases. prepositional verb • A prepositional verb is a type of MULTI-WORD ITEM. It is a VERB + PREPOSITION combination that is best understood, and best learned as a UNIT. • Prepositional verbs are called prepositional because their OBJECTS must be preceded by a preposition. A prepositional verb that is STRICTLY TRANSITIVE such as "rely on" will always be used with its preposition. • Ordinary transitive verbs such as "listen (to)" will be used with their preposition when they have an object; otherwise, they will be used without a preposition. For example: (1) "Sam told Sarah he loved listening to jazz." (The object "jazz" is preceded by "to.") (2) "Sam told Sarah he loved jazz but she wasn't listening." ("Listen" has no object, so there is no preposition._ • Prepositional verbs are SYNTACTIC MULTI-WORD ITEMS, not SEMANTIC MULTI-WORD ITEMS. In other words, they are best understood as a unit , not because they have their own meaning but because they require a preposition when they take an object. • The object of a prepositional verb is called a PREPOSITIONAL OBJECT. • Prepositional verbs are often DITRANSITVE as well as PREPOSITIONAL. For example, in the sentence, "The police charged Harry with drunken driving," "Harry" is the DIRECT OBJECT and "drunken driving" is the prepositional object. present perfect • The "present perfect" is one of the eight English verb tenses. It is formed by using the simple past of the verb "have" as an auxiliary and putting the main verb into the past participle. • It is used when there is a connection of one sort or another between the present and the past. In many situations, either the simple past or the present perfect can be used correctly. The present perfect cannot be used, however, if a past time at which an event occurred is mentioned. For example, "Jill has phoned Sarah three times yesterday" is wrong; the simple past must be used here: "Jill phoned Sarah three times yesterday." process "Process" is a general word — it is used to refer to anything that happens, in other words, to a series of events of some kind. For example, "Tom carefully explained to Sarah the whole process of recording information about the sick monkeys." It is a quite formal word that is particularly useful in talking about scientific subjects or about language. pronoun • Pronouns make up one of the eight word classes of English. They are FUNCTION WORDS which are used to replace noun phrases and noun clauses. • For example: "Harry told his wife that Tom's son had been killed in an accident. She began to cry and asked him who had told him that." In the second sentence, the pronoun "she" replaces "his wife," "him" replaces "Harry," and "that" replaces "that Tom's son had been killed in an accident." • The most important types of pronoun are: PERSONAL PRONOUNS ("I," "us"); REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS ("myself," "themselves"); INTERROGATIVE PRONOUNS ("who," "which"); DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS ("this," those"); and INDEFINITE PRONOUNS ("each," "some"). punctuation "Punctuation" is the use of "symbols," called "punctuation marks," to show how a written text is organized — and, so, to make its meaning clear. •The most important punctuation marks used in English are: - "period" (also called a "full stop") - "comma" NOTE: Commas and periods are of special importance to ESL students and their teachers because failure to use them correctly leads to two common and serious errors in the writing of ESL students: "run-on sentences" and "sentence fragments." The following punctuation marks are also very important: - "question mark" - "exclamation mark" - "apostrophe" - "quotation mark" These punctuation marks are useful but of less importance. - "colon" - "semi-colon" - "hyphen" - "dash" - "parentheses" - "brackets" refer • Words refer to the things they name; or, to say it in other words, they refer to the things they "point to." For example, in the sentence, "Harry told Sarah he wanted her to come to his home and meet his mother," the noun "home" refers to Harry's home, and the noun "mother" refers to Harry's mother. • Verbs and adjectives also refer. For example, in the sentence, "Harry ate a big breakfast just after 6:00," the verb "ate" refers to the "process" of Harry's putting food into his mouth and swallowing it, and the adjective "big" refers to the size of Harry's breakfast. • The noun form of "refer" is "reference." run-on sentence • A "run-on sentence" is actually two grammatical sentences which have been incorrectly punctuated as one sentence. For example, ¿"Jack told Jill he loved her, she said she loved him too."¿ is a run-on sentence. It should be written as two sentences with the comma replaced by a period or a semi-colon. • Run-on sentences are one of the most common "chronic errors" in the writing of advanced ESL students. The best way to reduce the number of mistakes of this kind is through practice in error detection and, perhaps, through theoretical explanations of sentence structure. senses of a word • The "same word" can have two or more completely different meanings; for example, the word "bore" can be used as a verb meaing, "to drill a hole," or as a verb meaning "to be uninteresting" — and it is also the past tense of the verb "bear." Since there is no obvious connection between these three ways of using the word, we can say that it has three completely different meanings. • There are many other cases, however, in which, although a word is used in two or more different ways, it would not be correct to say that it has two completely different meanings. The word "love," for example, is used in a different way in the sentence "Tom loves Jill," than it is used in the sentence "Tom loves playing golf," but, despite the difference there is an "obvious connection" between the way "love" is used in these two sentences. Because of that connection, rather than speaking of two different meanings, it is better to speak of two different senses of "love." sentence • a sentence is a grammatical group of words that contains at least one "finite-clause." • sentences begin with a "capital letter" and end with a "period," an "exclamation mark," a "question mark," or a "semi-colon." • sentences can be classified as - "simple sentences" (which contain just one finite clause and no other clauses) - "compound sentences" (which contain at least two independent clauses) - "complex sentences" (which contain at least one subordinate clause but only one independent clause) - "complex/compound sentences" (which contain at least one subordinate clause and at least two independent clauses) clause sentence/clause parts • The "sentence/clause parts" are the five categories into which all English sentences and clauses can be analyzed. They are: subject, object, complement, verb phrase, and adverbial. • The distinction between the sentence parts and the word classes is extremely important. Sentence parts may be made up of single words, but are more likely to be made up of phrases or clauses. • For much more on sentence parts and word classes, see the first two chapters of "Complex Sentences." separable phrasal verb • When a separable phrasal verb has a pronoun as its object, the pronoun-object must be placed between the verb and the ADVERBIAL PARTICLE that follows it. For example, For example: "The radio wasn't working properly, so Sarah turned it off." • The following sentence is grammatically incorrect because the adverbial particle is placed after the adverbial particle: ¿ "The radio wasn't working properly, so Sarah turned off it."¿ • When a separable phrasal verb has a noun or a short noun phrase as its object, the object can be placed either between the main verb word and the particle,or it can be placed after the particle. For example, both the two following sentences are correct: "The phone rang, so Sarah turned the radio off." "The phone rang, so Sarah turned off the radio." • When a separable phrasal verb has a long noun phrase as its object, the object should not be placed between the main verbword and the particle. For example: "Sarah turned off the radio Sam had given her for her birthday," but not: ¿¿"Sarah turned the radio Sam had given her for her birthday off."?? • For more about phrasal verbs, see the entry, "phrasal verb." simple past • The "simple past" is one of the eight English verb tenses. Regular verbs, and some irregular verbs form the simple past by adding "ed" to the base form. Most irregular verbs form their simple past in some other way. • The basic use of the simple past is to report past events in sentences such as "Jack met Jill in 1993." It is often difficult for ESL students to know whether to use the simple past or the present perfect. One important rule is that when the time at which an event happened is mentioned, the present perfect cannot be used. It would be incorrect, for example, to say "Jack and Jill have met in 1993." , strictly transitive verbs: • Strictly transitive verbs are verbs like "get" or "kill" which must take an object. (See also the entry: "transitive and intransitive verbs.") subject •The "subject" is one of the five basic sentence/clause parts. •Semantically, "subject" can be defined as the name of the part of the sentence that names the "agent" — the person or thing that does the action named by the verb. For example, in the sentence "Tom cooked supper," the word "Tom" which names the person who did the cooking is the subject.(However, in a passive sentence or clause, the subject names the recipient, not the agent.) Grammatically, "subject" can be defined as the noun, noun phrase or noun clause that precedes the verb phrase — sometimes separated from it by an adverbial. suffix A SUFFIX is a morpheme, which is added to the end of a word to change its meaning in a systematic way. For example, ‘Ize’ as in ‘politicize’ or ‘ness’ as in ‘drunkenness’. A similar word part placed at the beginning of a word is called a PREFIX. syllable • Words are pronounced in "syllables." For example, "eat" has one syllable, "eating" two syllables, and "edible" has three. • A syllable is a sound, or collection of sounds, that is "carried" by one "burst" of air coming from the speaker's lungs. ("Eating" has two syllables because, when it spoken, two separate bursts of air come from the speaker's lungs.) • All syllables contain at least one vowel. This vowel may be either a pure vowel or a diphthong. • Syllables also usually contain one or more consonants. • In a word with more than one syllable, one of the syllables will always carry the main stress. (The other syllable or syllables will either have a "secondary stress" or will be completely unstressed.) technical term • A technical term is a word or phrase that has a special meaning in a particular context — for example in grammar or in "computer studies." Usually, technical terms are ordinary English words that are given a special meaning, for example the grammatical technical term "modify" is also an ordinary English word with a meaning similar to "change." theoretical verb phrase • A "theoretical verb phrase" is a verb phrase which is grammatically correct but never used — or used only in very special circumstances. For example the phrases in the sentences: "By tomorrow Harry will have been being questioned for three straight days" and "Sarah bore here baby in the ambulance on the way to the hospital." third-person s-morpheme • The "third-person s-morpheme" is the morpheme, represented in speech by [s] and [z] and in writing by "s" or "es," which is added to the base form of a verb to make the "third-person" form. (For example, the third-person form of "eat" is "eats.") • This morpheme is of particular importance in ESL instruction because it is so often omitted in student writing. "to"-infinitive clause • A "to"-infinitive clause is a non-finite clause in which the main verb is a "'to'-infinitive." "To"-infinitive clauses can be noun clauses as in "Jack hopes to finish his report by the end of the week," adverbial clauses as in "Jack got up early in the morning to work on his report" or adjective clauses " as in "Jack discovered that the coffee shop was a good place to work without being disturbed." transitive and intransitive verbs: • A transitive verb is a verb which can be used with an object. For example, the verb "eat" is transitive because it can be used in sentences like: "Jack and Jill ate a big meal." In other words, it can be used in clauses with a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure. An Intransitve verb is a verb that can never be have an object: it cannot be used in SVO clauses. For example, the verbs "sleep," and "die" are both intransitive. • A verb is transitive, if it can be used with an object. Most transitive verbs can be used either with an object or without one. For example, as well as being used in SVO clauses, the verb eat can be used in subject-verb-adverial (SVA) clauses, as in "Jack and Jill have already eaten." • Some transitive verbs are "strictly transitive." These verbs can never be used without an object. "Kill" is a strictly transitive verb; "get" is another. For example, it would is incorrect to say, ¿¿"Jane got a ticket to the show but, Jill didn't get,"?? even though it is clear from the context what Jill didn't get. Instead the verb has to be omitted as in, "Jane got a ticket to the show, but Jill didn't," or to use a pronoun as in "Jane got a ticket to the show, but Jill didn't." verb • Verbs are a type of word. They make up one of the eight "word classes." • Grammatically, "verb" can be defined as: "a word that can be used in an English "verb phrase." • SEMANTICALLY, "verb" can be defined as the name of an "action," something that someone does, but although this definition is useful, it must be seen as subordinate to the grammatical definition — less important than it in other words. This is because there are many verbs, "be" and "believe" for example, that do not describe actions. • Verbs can be classified, grammatically, as "LEXICAL" or "AUXILIARY" verbs: lexical verbs such as "eat" and "read" can appear as the headwords of a "verb phrase" but auxiliary verbs such as "must" and "should" cannot. (The most common auxiliary verbs "have," "do," and "be" can also be used as lexical verbs, but "MODAL AUXILIARIES" such as "must" and "should" can only be used as auxiliaries.) • Lexical verbs can be "INLFECTED." In other words, their form can be changed by adding suffixes or in some other way in order to indicate their grammatical function. (The inflections of the regular verb "start," for example are as follows: "starts, "starting," "started.") verb complementation • The "complementation" of a particular verb is the grammatical form of the sorts of phrasal object and clausal object that the verb can be followed by. For example, the verb "believe" can be "complemented" by a noun phrase as in "Jack believed Jill's story" or by a "what"-clause as in "Jack believed what Jill told him" or by a "that"-clause as in "Jack believed that Jill was telling the truth." • The subject of verb complementation is of great importance to teachers of ESL "composition" and their teachers because errors of complementation are common even in the writing of advanced non-native writers. It is a difficult subject to teach however because there are no general rules and, as a result, the complementation "patterns" of a very large number of verbs have to be taken up one at a time. • NOTE: the term "verb complementation" is standard usage, I believe, but it is, perhaps, somewhat unfortunate because it can easily be confused with the term "complement" which refers to the "complement" sentence part — i.e. to "subject complements" and "object complements." Matters are further complicated by the fact that sentence-part complements must be distinguished from sentence-part "objects" — whereas, according to the terminological usage of flesl.net and of Complex Sentences, the clauses and phrases that "complement" verbs (that provide "verb complementation") are objects. verb form • Words in the verb word class, have several forms. The BASE FORM, for example, ‘eat’, the TO-FORM, ‘to eat’, the S-FORM, ‘eats’, the ING-FORM, ‘eating’, the PAST FORM, ‘ate’, and the past participle form ‘eaten’. In the case of REGULAR VERBS, and many IRREGULAR VERBS, the past-participle form and the past form are identical. verb phrase• The "verb phrase" is one of the five SENTENCE/CLAUSE PARTS. • We speak of verb phrases as being the verb phrases "of" a sentence or a clause, and we speak of a sentence or a clause as "having" a verb phrase. • A verb phrase may contain only one word as in the sentence, "Dick smokes cigars," and it may contain as many as four words as in the sentence, "Dick has been smoking cigars." • All the words in a verb phrase must belong to the "verb word class." (Verb phrases are unlike the four other sentence parts in this way; all of those can contain words from all the word classes.) verbs of perception • The most important "verbs of perception " are "see," "hear," "smell," "watch," and "feel." They are grammatically special because if they are complemented by a non-finite clause, the main verb of this clause can be in the base form, for example, "Sarah watched Tom and Dick walk across the park.:" The only other verbs that can be complemented in this way are the causative verbs. (Verbs of perception can also be complemented by non-finite clauses whose main verb is an "ing" form as in "Sarah watched Tom and Dick walking across the park.") verb tense • There is some disagreement among ESL educators and professional grammarians as to just how the phrase "verb tense" should be used. On flesl.net, it refers to the following eight following types of verb phrase formations: - simple present ("Jill eats a lot.") - simple past ("Jack ate a lot yesterday.") - present continuous ("Jack is eating in the cafeteria these days.") - past continuous ("Jill was eating breakfast when Jill arrived.") - present perfect ("Jack has eaten octopus several times.") - past perfect ("Jill had already eaten her dessert when Jack arrived.") - present perfect continuous ("Jack and Jill have been eating lunch together recently.") - past perfect continuous("Jack and Jill had been talking about Harry just before he phoned.") • In naming the verb tenses, the term "progressive" is often used instead of the term "continuous." In this context, the two words are synonymous. • Strict grammarians would generally say that there are only two tenses in English "past" and "present." They would say that the terms "perfect" and "continuous" refer, not to tenses, but to "aspects." • Writers of ESL materials often use the phrase "verb tense" quite loosely and describe as "tenses" the various ways of referring to the future, by using modal auxiliaries or the present continuous form of "go." They also sometimes refer to the passive voice as a tense. • The way the phrase "verb tense" is used on flesl.net is, I hope, a compromise between these two "extremes." vowel • For a list of the English vowels and the symbols used to represent them in the International Phonetic Alphabet go to the IPA page. • Vowels are one of the two main types of "speech sounds." Consonants are the other main type. • The difference between vowels and consonants is that vowels are at the "core" (or "center") of syllables. Consonants, on the other hand, come at the beginning or the end of a syllable. • In general, vowels are made by pushing air through an open vocal tract — in other words a vocal track that is not "obstructed" (or "blocked") in some way. Consonants, on the other hand are generally made by obstructing the air as it passes through the vocal tract. • There are exceptions, though: there are some consonants which are made with an open vocal tract; these "open" sounds are called consonants, because, although they are made with an open vocal tract, they come at beginning of a syllable. (For example the [w] sound and the beginning of the word "west.") • There are also some vowels made with a blocked vocal tract; they are called vowels because, although they are made with an obstructed vocal tract, they are at the core of syllables. (For example the [r] sound in the middle of the word "bird," as it is pronounced in standard North American English.) • For a list of the English vowels and the symbols used to represent them in the International Phonetic Alphabet go to the IPA page. • Vowels can be stressed or unstressed. For example, in the word "baby," the first vowel is stressed and the second unstressed. • Vowels can be "pure." In other words, they can contain only one "speech sound." (For example, the [i] sound in the word "beat." • Vowels can also be "diphthongs.") In other words, they can be a combination of two speech sounds. (For example the [aj] sound in the word "hide.") word class • According to the approach to grammar taken on "flesl.net" and in the accompanying text, "Complex Sentences," all English words belong to one or another of eight "word classes." • The eight classes are; noun, determiner, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, and conjunction. •These classes are defined in terms of the "jobs" they do in putting together the five "sentence/clause parts" For example, any explanation of the sentence/clause part, "subject" will mention that the subject of a clause will be either a noun phrase or a NOUN CLAUSE. And,of course, any full explanation of "noun phrase" or "noun clause" will have to include an explanation of "noun." • For more on word classes and sentence/clause parts, see Chapters One and Two of "Complex Sentences."