Tag Archives: Verbs

Woman having make-up applied to her face

Prepositions that lose their identity: phrasal verbs as nouns (and adjectives)

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,

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Winston Churchill, British prime minister during World War II

Grammar up with which I will not put: prepositions at the end of a sentence

That is grammar up with which I will not put Winston Churchill never said or wrote these words, which are frequently attributed to him (but since we are only a couple of weeks past the anniversary of Victory in Europe, why not have a photo of the inspirational wartime leader?). The joke quote seems to

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Commonly confused words: practice and practise (and licence and license and even more)

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

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Yellow, red, orange and blue shipping containers stacked on top and beside each other

Adjectives: an introduction

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

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Verbs as Nouns: participles and gerunds—grammatical chameleons

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

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Verbs: do – the emphatic, questioning and negative auxiliary

Do: the neglected third auxiliary verb In special situations, including where we want to give our verb extra strength or emphasis, we use a third auxiliary verb to power our sentences: the verb to do Verbs are often defined as doing, being and having words, as I discussed in an earlier post. While the special

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