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Grammatical terms (lectures 1--20)
1. The grammar of the English language is organized into five ranks: the sentence, the clause, the phrase, the word and the morpheme. Among them, the morpheme is the minimum or smallest grammatical unit, also the smallest meaningful element of speech. Morphemes fall into two categories: free morpheme and bound morphemes.
2. In terms of word formation, words can be divided into simple words, derivatives and compounds. In terms of grammatical function, words can be divided into two main groups: closed-class words(e.g. preposition, pronoun, determiner, conjunction, auxiliary) and open-class words(e.g. noun, adjective, adverb, main verb).
3. Subject-verb concord refers to the agreement between subject and predicate verb in number. There are three guiding principles; they are grammatical concord, notional concord and principle of proximity.
4. Case is a grammatical category. It denotes the changes in the form of a noun or a pronoun showing its relationship with other words in a sentence.
5. In English, most personal pronouns and interrogative/relative pronoun who have three case forms: the subjective case (like I, you), the objective case (like me, him) and the genitive case (my/mine).
6. An independent genitive can sometimes be used as prepositional complementation (traditionally known as prepositional object). The prepositional phrase (usually an of-phrase) that takes an independent genitive as complementation is called a double genitive.
7. Words that precede any pre-modifying adjectives in a noun phrase and which denote such referential meanings as specific reference, generic reference, definite quantity or indefinite quantity are referred to as determiners.
8. According to the potential position, determiners fall into three subclasses: central determiners (e.g. your, this ), predeterminers (e.g. double, twice) and postdeterminers (e.g. one, second). The articles are the most typical of determiners.
9. According to the different rules played in the formation of verb phrases, verbs are divided into two major
classes: main verbs and auxiliaries. According to lexical meaning, main verbs may be dynamic and stative. Auxiliaries fall into three categories:primary auxiliaries, modal auxiliaries and semi-auxiliarie s.
10. English main verbs have two finite forms and three non-finite forms. The two finite forms are the present tense and the past tense; the three non-finite forms are the infinitive (including the bare infinitive and the to-infinitive), the –ing participle and the –ed participle.
11.English verbs have two tenses: the present tense and the past tense.
12.Aspect as a grammatical term indicates whether an action or state at a given time is viewed as complete
or incomplete. English verbs have two aspects: the progressive aspect and the perfective aspect.
13. Mood as a grammatical category, is a finite verb form that indicates whether an utterance expresses a fact (indicative mood), a command or request (imperative mood), or a non-fact and hypothesis (subjunctive mood). There are two forms of subjunctive mood: be-subjunctive and were-subjunctive. 14. Voice is a grammatical category. It is a form of the verb which shows whether the subject of a sentence
acts or is acted on.
