What Is a Preposition? A preposition tells you where something is in relation to something else or when something happened. In terms of expressing where something is, prepositions can relay a static location or movement. For example, ‘in’ in the sentence, “London is in the United Kingdom,” is an example of a preposition expressing a […]
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What Is a Pronoun? To avoid repetition, we often replace nouns in sentences with pronouns. Therefore, the following saying holds true: “Where there’s no noun, there’s a pronoun.” For example, it would be laborious if we had to say, “The dog is eating the food. The food belongs to the dog. The dog likes the
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What Is an Adverb? Adverbs provide more information about a verb, an adjective or another adverb that can relate to manner, degree or place. Let’s take a look at adverbs using some examples. Adverbs and Verbs Just as an adjective provides more information about a noun, an adverb tells us more about how a verb
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What Is a Verb? Verbs refer to actions or states. For example, ‘to eat,’ ‘to sing ‘ and ‘to play’ are all verbs describing actions. The verbs ‘to be,’ ‘to seem’ and ‘to resemble’ are all verbs that refer to states. What Is the Infinitive? All verbs have an infinitive form, which means it is
What Is an Adjective? Adjectives are describing words. They tell us more descriptive information about a noun, such as the word ‘red’ in ‘a red car.’ Adjectives may be attributive (placed before the noun) or predicative (coming after the noun). Attributive Predicative The small house The house is small The cold room The room is
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What Is a Determiner? A determiner is a type of word that goes directly in front of a noun to provide more contextual information about it. It can tell you something about the location of the noun in relation to the speaker, something about its amount, or information about ownership. The words ‘a’, ‘an’ and
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What Is an Article? An article is used to determine whether a noun in a sentence is either known to the audience (the definite article) or non-specific and general (the indefinite article). For example, when we say, “The dog is in the kitchen,” we are making the assumption that the listener knows which dog we
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What Is a Noun? A noun is a word that gives a name to either an object, person or place (such as a ‘table,’ ‘queen’ or ‘London’) or an idea or concept (such as ‘love’). What is the difference between a common noun and a proper noun? In the examples above, one of the nouns,
What Is a Sentence? A sentence consists of at least one main clause and can include further related subordinate clauses to form a group of words that conveys a completed thought or idea. What is a clause? To understand what constitutes a sentence, we must first understand the idea of a clause. There are two
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What Is a Word? Words are the fundamental building blocks for languages. They represent the smallest unit of speech to have some conventional agreed meaning among a group of speakers of a language and to which other grammatical rules of the language can be applied. This is a practical definition, as linguists do not have
