English Grammar

English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, right up to the structure of whole texts.

There are historical, social, cultural and regional variations of English. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some dialects of English. This article describes a generalized present-day Standard English, the form of speech and writing found in types of public discourse including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news including both formal and informal speech. There are differences in grammar between the standard forms of British, American, and Australian English, although these are minor compared with the differences in vocabulary and pronunciation.

Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" (-'s).

Eight "word classes" or "parts of speech" are commonly distinguished in English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Nouns form the largest English word class, with verbs being the second largest word class. Unlike many Indo-European languages, English nouns do not have grammatical gender (although many nouns refer specifically to male or female persons or animals).

Word classes and phrases[edit]

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes – word classes that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante (a celebrity who frequents the fashion circles), similar relatively new words.[2] The others are considered to be closed classes. For example, it is rare for a new pronoun to enter the language. Determiners, traditionally classified along with adjectives, have not always been regarded as a separate part of speech. Interjections are another word class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language.

English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to except, to some extent, in the case of words with inflectional endings or derivational suffixes. On the other hand, some words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two different lexemes).[3] Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, and running.[3] Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. The noun aerobics has recently given rise to the adjective aerobicized.

Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class.[3] For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase. Similarly, adjective phrases and adverb phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs, but with other types of phrases the terminology has different implications. For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition together with its complement (and is therefore usually a type of adverb phrase); and a determiner phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner.

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