English Grammar

The building blocks

We start with ‘things’, the essential building blocks. When we speak or think or write, we have to have something in mind. Take ‘food’ for instance. It might be fast food, hot food or delicious food, but the thing is the food. The other words tell us more about it, but by themselves they are nothing; ‘Fast’, ‘hot’ and ‘delicious’ are meaningless in a vacuum. They have to refer to something, a fast runner, perhaps, or delicious dinner. When we say ‘hot today, isn’t it?’, the thing, though not stated, is obviously the weather, unless you happen to be eating chilli.

These ‘things’ are called nouns. The words which when attached tell us more about these things (e.g. fast, hot and delicious) are called adjectives. But language would be very static if all we had were nouns and adjectives. We also have to know what happens to these things, what is done with them; in other words, some action.

There are lots of things that can happen to food. You can buy it, cook it, chew it, swallow it, wolf it down, spit it out, give it away, lose it and put it in the fridge. These words which state the action are called verbs.

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Nouns

Nouns are things (or people or places), words that can have ‘the’ or ‘a’ in front of them:

            an apple; the apple
            a table; the table

Nouns can be subdivided into ‘common’ and ‘proper’ nouns: a common noun covers every kind of noun, except nouns which begin with a capital letter (i.e. names):

            apple; curiosity; cash; meringue; oak

A proper noun is the name of something. Proper nouns are names of people, places and things, and as with all names, have capital letters: James Bond, Birmingham and Eastenders are all proper nouns. Proper nouns are an exception to the ‘the’ and ‘a’ rule.
We don’t say ‘the Birmingham’ (although we can say ‘The Simpsons’).

One or two proper nouns are so widely used they turn into common nouns – and lose the capital letter. People talk of their ‘hoover’ whether Mr Hoover’s company made it or not. ‘Hoover’ even became a verb: ‘he hoovered the bedroom’.  Similar fame fell to Mr Macadam, the manufacturer of tar for the surfacing of roads. His trademark ‘tarmac’ is now applied to all road surfaces. Others include the Duke of Wellington who wandered around the battlefield of Waterloo in knee-high boots; the Earl of Sandwich who was fond of snacks of bread with savoury fillings; and Mr Macintosh who was fed up with forever getting soaked. And there are umpteen places which have given their names to things first made or found there: balaclava, cheddar, jersey, and champagne.

Most of our nouns are solid things, things we can see and touch. These we call ‘concrete’ nouns. There are also others, which we cannot see or touch, which are known as ‘abstract’ nouns:

            kindness; pain; humour; delay; popularity; overdraft

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Singular and plural

Most nouns have a plural form. The usual way to create a plural is to add an ‘s’:

            apples; tables

A few other plural forms have survived from the early days of English:

            mice (mouse)
            teeth (tooth); geese (goose); feet (foot)
            children (child)
            men (man); women (woman)
            loaves (loaf); hooves (hoof)

Some nouns end -es in the plural, or -ies, depending on the stem of the word:

            beaches (beach); brushes (brush)
            babies (baby); ladies (lady)

A few nouns don’t have a plural at all, like information and embarrassment, and one or two (e.g. sheep, fish)  can be either singular or plural.

From ancient Greek we have taken plural forms like theses (thesis) and phenomena (phenomenon), and from Latin formulae (formula) and curricula (curriculum). But the majority of words derived from these classical languages have English plurals (e.g. apologies, circuses, computers, craters, ideas, spectators, videos)  Ex-Latin words like data and agenda were plurals themselves in their ancient life, but now in English are treated as singulars. A few French plurals have survived the trip across the Channel (chateaux and gateaux), and one or two from elsewhere (Italian – tempi from tempo).

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Verbs

Here’s a collection of words that makes some sense but not complete sense

            The porter a mouthful of sandwich in the bin

What is missing is an action word like ‘found’ or ‘spat’. In other words, a verb. A verb describes the action, what happens or gets done.

            Clare swallowed the sandwich

A verb can also describe a condition or state (e.g. the verb to be) 

            The sandwich is in the bin

One of the reasons why we don’t sit musing on the manifestations of the English verb is that the definitions we have to muse with aren’t up to the job. Historically, the study of English verbs only started to happen as a result of a broader interest in grammar, and in particular the grammar of Latin. English was analysed as if it were Latin, which led to English verbs being forced into the moulds of Latin precedents. The present tense (a single word in Latin) has many equivalents in English:

laborat            he works (or she works)
                        s/he does work (or ‘does not’)
                        s/he is working

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Tenses of a verb

The tense of a verb is the timing of the action.

            Now I live in London   (present)
            Last year I lived in Paris    (past)
            Next year I shall live in Madrid    (future)

Strictly speaking English has only two tenses, the present and the past; by that we mean that the verb has only two forms to indicate tense

            live(s)
            lived

The ‘–ed’ ending is the regular past form; irregular ones are common too

            write, wrote
            sing, sang

Caesar’s famous three verbs, VENI VIDI VICI are all in the past tense. Again, we have many ways of expressing this tense in English:

            I came I saw I conquered
            I have come I have seen I have conquered
            I did come I did see I did conquer (’onest I did, guvnor)
            I have been coming I have been seeing I have been conquering

All these English expressions can represent the Latin words. So to accommodate the variety of expressions, we have ways of distinguishing tenses like the ‘present continuous’ (he is living) from the present simple (he lives). In the narrowest definition there are only two English tenses, the present and the past: lives and lived. The others are created by a string of words, or auxiliaries as they are sometimes called (‘is’, ‘will’, ‘have’, ‘was’, etc). Thus verbs frequently appear as phrases of two or more words:

            She will live in London
            They have been staying with my aunt

The present tense of an English verb is often used as a future:

            Tomorrow I am washing the car
            She is going to Cardiff University in September

If all this sounds complicated, don’t worry. The thing is to think behind the words. When English verbs were forced into the structural model of Latin ones they needed a good deal of stretching and squeezing to make them correspond. Latin tenses are simply not a good match. They do, however, lie at the root of all the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese), which all grew directly from Latin; and so, just how far they do match or do not match is worth a second look. In the key below, the English equivalents for each of the Latin/Romance tenses show just how much overlap there is:

Tenses: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Latin

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Singular and plural verbs

Like nouns, verbs have singular and plural forms:

            John lives in Bristol (singular)
            The Robinsons live in Manchester (plural)

The ‘number’ of a verb, i..e. whether singular or plural, depends on the number of people doing it. If just one, (John) then the verb is singular. If more than one (The Robinsons) then the verb will be plural. This is called agreement of number.

There are a few nouns that are singular in appearance but describe a group. These are called ‘collective’ nouns and grammatically are treated as singular nouns even though they describe more than one individual:

            The team is staying near London
            A crowd gathers outside the hotel

These collective nouns take a singular verb (is staying, gathers). But from time to time a collective noun may be treated as a plural – when the attention is on the different parts rather than on the whole:

            The team are all fit and well. (i.e. the different players)
            A number of policemen were at the nightclub within minutes

For ‘a number of policemen’ we might easily say intead ‘a lot of’ or ‘many’, and even though the noun ‘number’ is singular it is treated as a plural. But change ‘a number’ to ‘the number’ – a subtle difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’ – and we’re back to the singular:

            The number of policemen at the enquiry was six

This is because the number itself is uppermost in mind, not the various individual policemen. It all depends on whether you are thinking of a singular concept or several parts:

            The Simpsons is my favourite TV show      (singular verb)

‘The Simpsons’ is plural, but we’re thinking of the show, not the different members of the family. Compare with the genuine plural

            The Johnsons all live in a caravan       (plural verb)

There are other grey areas with words like each, either, every, everybody, neither, nobody and none. According to Roger Burchfield, a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, these may be treated as singular or plural. In practice it is possible to offer more guidance. ‘Every’ is almost always singular:

            Every record was checked

With most of the others again it depends on whether you have several or just one in mind:

My parents are going to stay with us. Neither wants to travel in the dark (singular)
Spaniards and Greeks will not visit Britain. Neither like the weather (plural)

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A Guide to English Grammar © GDA Sharpley 2006