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Showing posts from April, 2010

MID NUFF

Word Classes

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An Introduction to Words are fundamental units in every sentence, so we will begin by looking at these. Consider the words in the following sentence: my brother drives a big car We can tell almost instinctively that brother and car are the same type of word, and also that brother and drives are different types of words. By this we mean that brother and car belong to the same word class. Similarly, when we recognise that brother and drives are different types, we mean that they belong to different word classes. We recognise seven MAJOR word classes: Verb be, drive, grow, sing, think Noun brother, car, David, house, London Determiner a, an, my, some, the Adjective big, foolish, happy, talented, tidy Adverb happi

Verbs

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Verbs have traditionally been defined as "action" words or "doing" words. The verb in the following sentence is rides : Paul rides a bicycle Here, the verb rides certainly denotes an action which Paul performs - the action of riding a bicycle. However, there are many verbs which do not denote an action at all. For example, in Paul seems unhappy , we cannot say that the verb seems denotes an action. We would hardly say that Paul is performing any action when he seems unhappy. So the notion of verbs as "action" words is somewhat limited. We can achieve a more robust definition of verbs by looking first at their formal features. The Base Form Here are some examples of verbs in sentences: [1] She travels to work by train [2] David sings in the choir [3] We walked five miles to a garage [4] I cooked a meal for the family Notice that in [1] and [2], t