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
While other parts of speech have rules governing where they are placed – for example, verbs need to be the first or second element in a sentence – adverbs can float around quite happily. Often we use them at the start (as you can see where the adverb often is used in this sentence) to
Adverbs have always been my favourite part of speech. I think this is partly because, when I first learnt about them in primary school, there was a beautiful simplicity to them – or at least there was in my view. As the name suggests, adverbs add to a verb. The primary school definition is that
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,
The English language is constantly changing. New words are created and old words fall into disuse. Australians start to speak and write differently from Canadians; New Zealanders use the language differently from Singaporeans. And to cope with these changes, grammar rules themselves change. For speakers of some other languages, the fact that the ‘rules’ of
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