Use of English Grammar

English grammar is what holds the written language together in a way that makes it intelligible and able to be understood by others. Just as a constitution is a set of rules that allows a nation to function, grammar is a set of rules that allows the language to function as a medium for communication. English grammar has been built over millennia in an eclectic fashion from a wide variety of grammars, mostly from Europe. Words assimilated from other parts of the world during the British Empire stage are shaped to fit into the established grammar.

Usage and Mechanics

English grammar is recognized first in its use of parts of speech. A writer needs to know grammar to use the correct nouns, verbs, pronouns and modifiers in a written message. English communicates in sentences, and syntax is the way the sentences fit together. Syntax, therefore, is made up of sentence subjects, predicates and complements, and these may be either simple or compound, depending on their meaning. English grammar breaks sentences into phrases and clauses in the sentence structure. There are two types of clause: a main clause, which can stand as a sentence on its own, or a subordinate clause, which depends on a main clause for its meaning. A phrase is a group of words without a verb.

Verbs, Nouns and Pronouns

Verbs and nouns are largely the controlling parts of speech in English grammar. Verbs give a sentence purpose and gives writing movement. Verbs determine time and voice in a narrative. Time in a verb is expressed as tense. There are past, present and future tenses. For example, the verbs "went," "going," and "will go" represent these tenses, respectively. The voice of verbs in English is expressed as active or passive. The active verb is used when the subject performs the action on the object. A passive voice is when the action is performed (passive verb) on the subject. For example, Active voice: The pitcher threw a fastball; Passive voice: A fastball was thrown by the pitcher. In English, the verb being used must agree with the subject in number, either singular or plural. For example: Singular verb: The author writes. Plural verb: The authors write. Nouns are words that name the subject or object of a sentence or phrase. Pronouns are any word that takes the place of a noun or another pronoun. For example: using "him" instead of "John" or "them" instead of "John and Bill."

Modifications

English grammar modifies the meaning or usage of words depending on where or why they are used. A noun can be further explained by using an adjective before it, and verbs can be modified in their action by an adverb. Any word at the beginning of a sentence begins with a capital letter, as do all proper nouns. A proper noun is a noun that is also a name or being used as a title, for example, John Smith or Principal Jones. The English language also has punctuation that helps the reader know what mood the writer wanted particular phrases or words to be read. The punctuation most often used is the comma and the period. Commas are used to separate three of more words, phrases or clauses in a series. Using commas correctly will allow a piece of writing to be read quickly and easily and can be learned in any approved English composition course.

Spelling and Vocabulary

The English language has the largest vocabulary in the world. Of all the languages, only English has been developed entirely from a fusion of other languages. English takes its words from Saxony in Germany, Scandinavian through Scots, Latin and Greek through the Romans, and French from France. The vocabulary in much of the language has duplicate words from each source. This has made the spelling of English vocabulary quite diverse. English has many silent letters, which in the original language were actually pronounced. For example, "knight" is pronounced "night" in English but in Scots, it was "kenigghit," with a guttural sound for "ght." Spelling rules exist in English grammar but because of the varied sources, there are many exceptions. These are called irregular, and grammar texts will have irregular words listed in them.

Diagramming

A diagrammed sentence

To understand English grammar, we can use the skill of diagramming, which depicts in diagrammatic form all the processes of a sentence. Each part of speech has a different representation. The reader of a sentence diagram can instantly see the relationship between one word and the other by the way that it is connect by lines in the diagram. Sentence diagramming is an invaluable tool for teaching English grammar, but once learned it can also be applied to other languages. This knowledge will assist in the understanding of lexical relationships in other languages as well. When William Caxton brought the printing press to England in the 1400s, he codified the many versions of English into one standard, and thus began what we now know as the English language.

References

• Purdue University
• Diagramming

Resources

• English Plus