Determiners are a new part of speech. Yes, you read that correctly: while the English language and its speakers cannot come up with a singular gender-neutral pronoun, linguists and grammar experts have managed to invent a whole new category of grammatical function in the last century. How is this possible? How had it not been
Phrasal verbs as nouns Prepositions are easy to identify when they are fulfilling their main function: connecting nouns. But their nature becomes less clear when they combine with verbs to form phrasal verbs, and even less clear when those verbs are used as nouns and adjectives. Just like many other verbs are used as nouns,
The difference between these two words is simple to remember: dependant is a noun and dependent is an adjective. The dependent calf relies on its mother for food and protection. Official forms often ask how many dependants you have. One way to remember the difference is to be confident that (like confident, silent, diligent and
English spelling is tricky: that is something most people agree on. There are a couple of pairs of words that a particularly troublesome for a lot of people: practice and practise, and licence and license. Prophecy and prophesy follow the same rules, but as prophesy in particular isn’t commonly used (prophesise seems to have taken
We know that there are proper nouns, and we know that we use capital letters for proper nouns. But there is another group of words in English that we capitalise, and they are called proper adjectives. Never heard of them? Don’t worry: most people haven’t. Proper adjectives are like the long-lost cousin of proper nouns,
I have looked at this question in my blog on Possessive apostrophes: when do you need them? but it is worth looking at in more detail, as it is one of the trickier areas of grammar. It is also one where the answer is sometimes not clear, but can either be illogical or even open
Adjectives and nouns: a close relationship In my first blog on the parts of speech, I wrote that the same word can often be used as different parts of speech, and we have already looked at how some words can be both nouns and verbs. But it is probably adjectives that are the part of
Adjectives have a simple use: they describe nouns, and also pronouns and other adjectives. A simple definition is that adjectives are ‘describing words’. If we think of nouns as containers of meaning, adjectives help to give extra definition to our meaning. We can talk about a container, for example, or a yellow container or a
Verbing: when nouns become verbs Our language is changing all the time; this keeps it alive. One of the most controversial areas is the practice of using what used to be a noun as a verb – a practice that, like nominalisation, also has its own name: verbing. As you can see, the very word
Verbs as nouns Some words are like amphibious vehicles that can be both a boat and a truck: the same basic word form is equally at home behaving in very different ways One of the confusing aspects of English is that the same word can act as different parts of speech, or change the function