NOUN CLASSES

NOUN CLASSES

Check the lists of functions of the determiner in which the attempt is made to put zero, the, a, some, and zero plus plural with each of the nouns. Maybe it's obvious that a proper noun like "John" should be different from other nouns, but why shouldn't "bottle" work with a zero determiner as "cake" does? Well, all common nouns are not alike in English. Some nouns are countable (like "bottle") some are non-countable (like "furniture") and some are both (like "cake"). There is a lot to be understood about how English speakers think about the world from considering how we categorize nouns.

• PREDETERMINERS [These come in the noun phrase BEFORE the determiner]
• All, both, half
• Double, twice, three/four . . . times
• One-third, two-fifths, etc.
• DETERMINERS
• POSTDETERMINERS [These come AFTER the determiner, but before an adjective]
• Cardinal numerals
• Ordinal numerals and general ordinals
• Pre Modifier/ modifier
• Head
• Post Modifier.

Example: the little girl in the dog cage

            The = determiner

            Little = pre modifier/modifier

            Girl = head

            In the dog cage = post modifier

PRONOUNS

1. Pronouns do not admit determiners (you can't say "the he")
2. Pronouns often have an objective case (him or her, for instance)
3. Pronouns often have person distinction (we, you, they, for instance)
4. Pronouns often have overt gender contrast (he versus she)
5. Singular and plural forms of pronouns are often not morphologically related (I versus we, for example)

• CASE [Three cases: subjective, objective, genitive.]
• PERSON
• GENDER
• NUMBER
• PERSONAL PRONOUNS (subject, object and genitive case, such as: I, you, we, they, he, she, it)
• REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS (myself, herself, etc)
• POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS (mine, yours)
• RELATIVE PRONOUNS (WH, which, whose used in relative clause)
• INTERROGATIVE PRONOUNS (WH, which, whose, whom)
• DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS (this, that)
• UNIVERSAL PRONOUNS AND DETERMINERS (all, both, (every, each + body, thing, one))
• PARTITIVE PRONOUNS
• Non-assertive usage [It's what little kids are doing when they blame spilt milk on "nobody": "Who did that?" "Nobody..." It's a pronoun which does not assert an agent of action.]
• Either, neither, and the negatives
• Quantifiers (some, any, enough, several, many, much)
• NUMERALS
• The uses of one
• Cardinals and ordinals

ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS

Note how this material is divided up. The assumption is that all modifiers -- adjectives and adverbs -- have certain things in common, and they need to be looked at as a single set. This is one of the strengths of this sort of descriptive grammar (as opposed to a transformational or generative grammar). While it may be that adjectives and adverbs are generated out of very different parts in the deep structure of a generative system, they nevertheless have a number of symmetrical characteristics in the surface structure. The first four units in the chapter focus on the essentials of the adjective. 

• CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ADJECTIVE
• SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS OF ADJECTIVES

The next four units focus on the essentials of the adverb.

• CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ADVERB
• ADVERB AS ADVERBIAL
• ADVERB AS MODIFIER
• ADVERB AS COMPLEMENT OF PREPOSITION 

Comparison and degree are shared by both kinds of modifiers, so we're not surprised to find them together here, and the unit on their correspondence follows naturally. 

• COMPARISON AND INTENSIFICATION
• CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB
• LINKING VERB

• CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ADJECTIVE
• We're talking about what amounts to a set of characteristics, some part of which will have to apply, but perhaps not all will apply in any given circumstance:
• Adjectives may inflect for the comparative and the superlative [big, bigger, biggest]
• Adverbs may be derived from an adjective by means of adding "-ly."
• Most adjectives can be premodified with the intensifier, "very."
• Most adjectives can be made comparative or superlative with "more" or "most," respectively.
• SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS OF ADJECTIVES
• Adjectives can be "attributive," which means that they occur before nouns and after the determiners, and then name an attribute of the noun (e.g., an entertaining book; the handsome prince") or the adjective can be a part of the predicate of the sentence.  Here are some predicative adjectives:
• Your daughter is pretty.
• I think what he wrote stupid.

You probably ought to check out the seven clausal types in order to understand where the adjective can show up in a basic clause; those occasions are the places where an adjective can be "predicative."

• Adjectives can be placed after the noun for certain stylistic effects: "The people involved..." (Note that the adjective in this case is in fact a participle.  Participles are adjectives!!!! )
• Adjectives can be used "substantively" or as the head of a noun phrase.  (e.g., "Youth is wasted on the young." It's works like a noun (it's the object of the preposition), but young can also take the intensifier very in front of it, as adjectives can.
• Verbless Adjective Clause: Actually, these are not "verbless," but rather they are embedded clauses of the type "noun is adjective" where the underlined items have been deleted in the process of embedding.  Transformational/generative grammars insist that even attributive adjectives are embedded predications of this sort.

• CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ADVERB
• Adverbs are often inflected by "-ly."
• It may function syntactically as an adverbial [see below]
• It may modify an adjective or another adverb. [see below] 
• ADVERB AS ADVERBIAL
  Essentially, this depends upon the participation of the item in the first clausal type: S V_intens A
   
• ADVERB AS MODIFIER
  You know this stuff already, but check the book.
   
• ADVERB AS COMPLEMENT OF PREPOSITION
  This is an interesting use of the adverb.  Remember that prepositions themselves often have an adverbial status (e.g., "before"); particularly notice the orderliness of time adverbs.
   
• COMPARISON AND INTENSIFICATION

You know this stuff already, but check the book.  Saya skipping part ini daripada garing..

• CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB
  Remember that adverbs are often derived from adjectives, so that constructions which contain such adverbs often maintain a relationship with those which contain the corresponding adjectives. 

• LINKING VERB:

Linking verbs are verbs that do not show action; instead, the linking verb renames or describes the subject. In this example sentence, "The kitten looked happy" the verb looked is used as a linking verb. contoh lebih lanjut check your book….

 

PREPOSITION

• THE PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE
• (note: not object, because an object is likely to be construed as a single word, when in fact we're talking about a noun phrase which completes the Prepositional Phrase.
• POSTPOSED PREPOSITIONS
• This is particularly useful for a difference made between casual and formal English. Formal English attempts usually to eschew postpositives. Think about how "where is he staying at?" works. You can postpositives as stylistic choice. Also consider, "What did you do that for?" Can you prepose it? (I don't think so...)
• SIMPLE AND COMPLEX PREPOSITIONS
• It's useful to try to imagine whether simple prepositions may be stative and complex prepostions may be dynamic. Examples?
• SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS OF PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES
• adjunct, disjunct, conjunct, postmodifier, verb complementation, adj. complementation. Check the examples and be sure you know how these work.
• PREPOSITIONAL MEANINGS -- PLACE
• PREPOSITIONAL MEANINGS – TIME           you may know these. But check your book. Saya skipping part ini daripada melakukan pengulangan jadinya garing hehe. 

Note: prepositional phrases locate noun phrases in space or time. Anything else? "Of"? In all cases?

• PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE CHIEFLY AS ADJUNCT
• PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE CHIEFLY AS POSTMODIFIER
• PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE CHIEFLY AS DISJUNCT OR CONJUNCT
• PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE CHIEFLY AS COMPLEMENTATION OF VERB OR ADJ.
• MODIFICATION OF PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES

TYPES OF VERB

• VERBAL FORMS AND THE VERB PHRASE

A verb may occur in as many as five different forms. In fact, one test for a verb is whether it takes at least two of these five forms.

1. base: this is the form of the verb with no morphological additions, such as -ed or -ing. It serves for all forms but one in the present tense, for all forms of the imperative, for all forms of the lexical subjunctive, and for all forms of the infinitive (with or without "to"). One job of the verb phrase is to reduce the confusion so many uses of the base might cause, if other things did not help us to separate the uses.
2. -s form: this is the 3rd person singular present. It's like your appendix; you really don't need it, but it's there, and variants of English have begun to drop it.
3. past or -ed(1): this marks the past in every instance of the simple past. [Now do NOT confuse past tense with a perfect aspect.]
4. -ing form: this is used to mark the main verb in a progressive aspect (e.g., I am calling you.) or as a present participle. [REMEMBER: participles are adjectives. Not all -ing words are participles. They are only participles if they have an adjective function as in "John, sweating profusely, was straining to win."] While Quirk and Greenbaum don't mention it here, -ing is also used to make the verbal noun or gerund: "eating is more fun than sleeping."
5. -ed(2) form: used to mark the verb in the perfective aspect, in the passive form, and in the participle. In regular lexical forms, you usually see -ed employed, but in some forms you find -en. In order to distinguish between -ed(1) and -ed(2), some systems of grammar say that this is the -en form, even though an -ed is often used to spell it. The adjectival quality of the past participle form is seen in something like, "tired of trying, she took a break."

• THE MORPHOLOGY OF LEXICAL VERBS -- REGULAR LEXICAL VERBS

Regular lexical verbs employ all five forms. If you now the base, you can predict the other forms, and -- indeed -- with any regular form, you can predict the base. Note that this section is really about spelling rules, and you should consult it if you're creating units on spelling.

• The -ing and -s forms
• The past and the -ed participle
• Further inflectional spelling rules
• Doubling of consonant
• Treatment of -y
• Deletion of -e
• THE MORPHOLOGY OF LEXICAL VERBS -- IRREGULAR LEXICAL VERBS

While regular lexical verbs are clearly an open system (if you coin a verb, you'll almost certainly make it a regular lexical verb), the irregular lexical verbs are pretty much a closed system. They share with regular lexical verbs, however, the primary duty of providing semantic material rather than syntactical information, so we classify them as lexical verbs. Historically, English (or proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English) had two verb systems which historical linguists call "weak" and "strong" (regular and irregular, respectively). The strong verb system was categorized into seven sub-classes, and the verbs in the little jingle which follows are (in their Old English forms) typical of the verbs in each of the sub-classes:

The cat will bite [I.] the bird that will not fly [II.]
And spring [III.] on the cat when he comes [IV.] by;
He gives [V.] no quarter and takes [VI.] no guff,
And holds [VII.] him a fool who falls [VII.] for such stuff.

One of the major difficulties you will encounter in teaching English grammar will have to do with the irregular lexical verbs. We can tell from comparing how they work in different Germanic languages that they were always a bit fluid in their categorization. Quirk and Greenbaum do an admirable job of placing our modern verbs into a seven-part system, and they draw on much historical data to do it, but -- again -- the sub-classes do not exactly correspond to the historical classes, because they are still very fluid. Currently, we hear much shifting of -ed(1) with -ed(2), where both forms are irregular: drink, drunk, have drank; ring, rung, have rang, etc. The most important thing you can do is make students aware of the fluid nature of this situation, so that they can consciously look for the way the irregular lexical verbs are used in various registers.

                        AUXILIARIES

It should be obvious, but it may not be: do, have, and be exist as lexical verbs as well as auxiliaries. As lexical verbs, do means "to perform"; have means "to possess"; and be means "to exist." Note the list of contractions in 3.20. Contractions are a regular part of English, and are only stigmatized in formal writing, except for "ain't," which appears to have been stigmatized through the efforts of several generations of school marms.

                        The modal auxiliaries

                        Primary modal auxiliaries

Note the semantic force of all of the modals as variations on the ability to achieve a thing. Some dialects combine modals to create even finer variations on ability: "I might could help you" is different from "I might help you" and "I could help you." While it is clearly a dialect marker, it also represents a great complexity in the verb phrase of the user. Consider whether "can" and "could" (as well as the other paired modals) are contrasted by tense or by something else.

                        Marginal modal auxiliaries

                        FINITE AND NON-FINITE VERB PHRASES

This is a dynamic versus a stative distinction. "He is working" uses a finite verb phrase and it is dynamic: "working" is used as a part of the verb in the progressive aspect. "I found him working" uses a non-finite verb phrase and it is stative:"working" here is a present participle, and it's adjective quality makes it stative. If you insert the deleted "to be" (I found him [to be] working), you can re-constitute the infinitive form in the non-finite verb phrase. Pusing ama penjelasan di atas?

Pendeknya gini boss:

Finite:  verb yg kena aturan tense, gender, number, aspect, person,

- The truck demolished the restaurant.
- The leaves were yellow and sickly.
- She writes home every day. 
- She wrote home yesterday. 
- David plays the piano
- My sister spoke French on holiday

Non finite: Non-finite verbs are not limited by subject, person, number or tense. They are to infinitive, base verb (infinitive), gerund, passive and active participle.

- He’s repaired that broken clock.
- David loves to play the piano.
- Written in 1864, it soon became a classic.
- Leaving home can be very traumatic.
- It took courage to continue after the accident.
- Leave immediately when you are asked to do so.

- I can swim.

Implikasi kalimat: bisa memungkinakan eksistensi finite and non finite veb bersamaan:

The children were talking to each other when the teacher came in. 

Were= finite verb

Talking = non finite verb

Came = finite verb.

I can swim.

Can= finite modal

Swim= non finite.

                        TENSE, ASPECT, AND MOOD

These are the major contrasts in English. The following considerations are basic:

0.      English has (and has always had) only two tenses. We only mark the verb for the present (which is a nul morpheme) and the past.

1.      The English future is always implied by modals, and the gradations of expression are very complex.

2.      Aspect is the manner in which the action is regarded. For instance is it regarded as having passed or having started after (or before) another thing? Just as English implies the future, it tends to imply any complexities of past action by referring it to an ongoing or not ongoing state or to other actions which are or are not completed.

3.      Mood is, in short, attitude, such as certainty, obligation, possibility, etc.

                        Tense and Aspect

§  Present

§  timeless: she is generous

§  limited: he is being generous

§  instantaneous: I take my place

§  Past

§  The past and the perfective

§  Indefinite and definite

§  Past perfect

§  The past and the progressive

§  The perfect progressive

§  Verbal meaning and the progressive

Not all verbs are capable of being used in a progressive construction. This is one of those places where semantics is related to grammar. If the verb is semantically dynamic (note the five classes of dynamic verbs at 3.35), then it can be progressive. If the verb belongs to one of the two stative classes, then it won't be made progressive in most variants of idiomatic English. To create a progressive out of these verbs will sound foreign, because -- in fact -- it is:

I am understanding your remarks.
The pretty box has been containing the candy.

                        The Future

Historical linguists love to speculate on how it is that Germanic languages have no "synthetic" future -- that is, they have no inflection to make a future the way they can make a past, although other Indo-European languages have such a future. In fact, we have at least eight ways of rendering the future through implication (and Old English had a similar inventory of futurities). If proto-Germanic were as rich in suggesting the future periphrastically (that is, using several words to do so), then the synthetic future may simply have withered away.

§  Will and shall

§  Be going to + infinitive

§  Present progressive

§  Simple present

§  Will/shall + progressive

§  Be to + infinitive

§  Be about to + infinitive

§  Future time in the past

                        Mood

We usually say that there are three moods: the indicative (i.e., the attitude of indicating), the imperative (i.e., the attitude of giving commands), and the subjunctive (the attitude of supposing what is unknown or contrary to fact). The sense of the subjunctive is much more complex, however. It encompasses the following five ways of dealing with gradations of the known and the unknown:

§  The subjunctive

Historically, this was an entirely different conjugation of the verb, and we can see the sort of variety it once had in the elaborate subjunctives of French or Spanish or German. Old English had an inventory of subjunctive forms as wide spread as German. Now we have some frozen forms of the subjunctive in the verb "to be" and one special form in the present, where the third person singular is not inflected with an -s. What the book calls the "mandative" subjunctive requires this verb form:

Common sense demands that he think twice.

This is, however, a very formal register for most speakers, and most of us would get around the subjunctive by saying, "It's only common sense to think twice."

There are also formulaic subjunctives (God save the Queen!, etc.), but either they are formulaic for a speaker or they are not in his/her ideolect.

Many -- but by no means all -- American speakers still have the subjunctive were for use in hypothetical instances: "If I were you, I wouldn't waste time on the subjunctive."

§  Modal past

Other past-tense forms of "to be" may take a subjunctive sense, too: "We were catching the 8 o'clock train and it is nearly 8 o'clock." The were cannot possible mean past time here, but it is used to suggest mood appropriate to the subjunctive, that is that the train appears not to be about to arrive, so that the condition of catching it is contrary to fact.

§  The uses of the modal auxiliaries

Check the lists for an attempt to identify the gradations of meaning in the modals.

§  The tense of modals

What we call modals are sometimes call "preterite-present" verbs by historical linguists. It is thought that, historically, the original past-tense form of irregular verbs came to be used as the present, and a new past-tense form was created using the inflection of the regular verb. The use of modal in setting conditions or subjunctive moods, however, make it impossible for us to think of "would" as merely the past tense of "will" etc. What may be historically a past tense has been exploited to create another modal contrast.

§  The modals and aspect