Grammatical terminology recommended by the LAGB for use in schools (version 6, June 2013)
Comments please to the author, Dick Hudson
abbreviation. An abbreviation is a shortened way of writing a word or group of words (in contrast with contractions, which primarily affect pronunciation). For example: Co. (Company), approx. (approximately), PR (public relations)Some common abbreviations are of Latin terms (for example:e.g. (exempli gratia = for example)).Names of organisations are often abbreviated using the initial letters of each word (e.g.the NHS (National Health Service)). Some such abbreviations (e.g.NATO, FIFAand UNESCO) have their own pronunciationand are called ‘acronyms’.
abstract noun and concrete noun. Nouns such as beauty, time, hour and grammarare often classified as abstract in contrast with concrete nouns such as dog, tree, stone and person. However, this is not a grammatical distinction, because it does not affect the grammar of the words concerned. It is a matter of meaning, so the same noun may sometimes have a concrete meaning, and at other times an abstract one, without affecting its grammar; for instance, book may name either a concrete object made of paper and cardboard (I picked up the book), or the abstract information which may be contained in a large number of concrete books (She’s writing a book.).
accusative. See case.
acronym. see abbreviation
active verb.Many verbs can be either active or passive (a contrast traditionally called ‘voice’). For example, bite:
The dog bit Ben.(active)
Ben was bitten by the dog.(passive)
In the active sentence, the subject(the dog) is the ‘agent’ (i.e. performs the action) and the object(the ‘patient’) receives it. In the passive sentence, the subject (Ben) is on the receiving end of the action. The two sentences give similar information, but there is a difference in focus. The first is about what the dog did; the second is about what happened to Ben.
Passives use the pastparticiple, and usually follow be (It was repaired) orget (It got broken), or even modifying a noun (the trees broken by the storm).
In English (but not in other languages such as French or German), the subject of a passive often corresponds to the object of a preposition in the active:
The dog barked at Ben. (active)
Ben was barked at by the dog. (passive)
‘Prepositional passives’ are particularly common in casual styles.
A passive verb allows the agent to be identified using by: Ben was bitten by the dog. But very often, in passive sentences, the agent is unknown or insignificant, and therefore not identified: The computer has been repaired.
Passives without agent are common in formal styles. For example:
It was agreed that ... (compare We agreed that...).
Application forms may be obtained from the address below.
adjective. E.g. big, extensive, vertical. Adjectives are sometimes called ‘describing words’ because they pick out single characteristics such as size or colour. This is a useful way to remember what adjectives are, but doesn't really help to distinguish them from other word classes because verbs, nouns and adverbs can do the same. Instead, it is better to identify adjectives by their range of grammatical uses. A typical adjective can be used:
• either before a noun (e.g. big box), acting as the noun's modifier. This use is called ‘attributive’.
• or after the verb be (e.g. is big), acting as the verb's subject complement.Because subject complements are sometimes called ‘predicates’, this use is called ‘predicative’.
Short adjectives such as big and short have comparative and superlative forms:
bigger, biggest
short, shortest
adjective phrase. E.g. very nice, good enough to sell. An adjective phrase is a phrase whose head is an adjective.
adverb. E.g. quickly, fortunately, soon, almost, very. Adverbs are often added to a verb (hence their name) to provide more details about its meaning, especially its manner, time, or place (e.g. He arrived quickly. He will leave soon).
Many adverbs are formed by adding -ly to an adjective (quick-ly, fortunate-ly - but not friendli-lyor loneli-ly!) so these adverbs are easy to recognise, and help to identify others which may replace them.
Verbs are not the only words to which adverbs may be added: They may also modify the meaning of other word classes, including:
• adjectives (nearly impossible, extremely good; so ‘intensifiers’ are a type of adverb),
• other adverbs (almost impossibly difficult).
In addition, there are cases where adverbs modify an entire clause or sentence (Fortunately, she was unharmed), and occasionally even determiners, noun phrases, or prepositional phrases (She ate almost all the cake, Tonight you can see almost the whole moon, The rug reached almost to the wall).
adverb phrase. E.g. very carefully, so recently that I can still remember it. An adverb phrase is a phrase whose head is an adverb.
adverbial. E.g.Recently, at home, this morning, when it rains. In Recently, I saw my neighbour in his garden, both recently and in his garden are adverbials -
partsof the clause which modify the verb. The term shows the similarity of use between the preposition phrasein the garden and the adverb recently. An adverbial is typically an adverb (recently), but may instead be a preposition phrase (in the garden), a noun or noun phrase(this morning)or a subordinate clause (when I arrived). The term ‘adverbial’ is generally reserved for modifiers of a verb, even though adverbs can be used to modify other kinds of word; so unexpectedly is an adverbial in He arrived unexpectedly, but not in He did unexpectedly well.
affirmative. A clause may be classified as either affirmative or negative; for example, It is rainingand Somebody called for youare affirmative, but can be made negative by adding not or nobody: It is not raining and Nobody called for you.The term positive is often used as a synonym of affirmative, and the contrast is called polarity.
affix, affixation. An affix is a morpheme which cannot itself be an entire word, and is always attached to a base. An affix can be
• a prefix, added before the base(intolerant, dislike)
• a suffix, added after the base(kindness, playing).
It may be used to signal either inflection (e.g. playing) or derivation (e.g. player)
agent. The person or agent which carries out the action described by a verb is often called the agent. The agent is the 'do-er' of the action. For instance, in John caught the ball, John (the person, not the word) is the agent, and the ball is the 'patient'. This classification does not extend easily beyond 'action' verbs; for instance, it is not helpful to describe John as the agent in John is ill or John received a letter. See also: active and passive.
agree, agreement. In some cases the form of a verb changes according to its subject,so the verb and subject are said to 'agree'. This happens with the verb be:
I am/he is/they are
I was/you were
and the third person singular (he/she/it) of the present tense:
I like/she likes
I don't/he doesn't
Note that singular collectivenouns (eg team, family, government) can take a singular or plural verb form. For example: The team (= it) is playing well. The team (= they) are playing well.
There are also a few cases where a determiner must agree with a noun according to whether it is singular or plural. For example:
this housethese houses
much trafficmany cars
Some languages have very rich and complex agreement systems; for example, in German:
• der junge Mann wohnt hier. 'The young man lives here'
• die jungen Männer wohnen hier. 'The young men live here'.
ambiguous, ambiguity. A word or phrase which has more than one possible interpretation is ambiguous. This sometimes arises from unclear grammatical relationships. For example, in the headline: police shoot man with knife, it is not specified whether the man had the knife or the police used the knife to shoot the man. Both interpretations are possible, although only one is logical. Ambiguity is often a source of humour.
anaphora, anaphoric. Anaphora is the 'referring back' relation between one word and another, its antecedent. For example, in Bill hurt himself, the reflexive pronounhimself refers back anaphorically to Billbecause himselfnames the same person as Bill; more generally, in any sentence of the form X hurt himself, himselfand X name the same person. Similarly, the personal pronounsherefers anaphorically to Emily in I saw Emily yesterday. She told me that she had changed jobs. As this example shows, anaphora may link words that are in different sentences. In the examples given so far, the pronoun names the same individual as its antecedent, but in some case the anaphora may involve a general category rather than an individual; for example, the noun one means 'book' in I read one book yesterday and a different one today. An anaphoric element is a word or phrase that gets its meaning via anaphora.
antecedent. The antecedent of a relative pronoun is the noun that the relative clause modifies; for example, in people who live in London, the antecedent of who is people. More generally, any anaphoric element has an antecedent, the word or phrase to which it is linked by anaphora. For example, in I asked Mary to help me, but she wouldn't do it, the words she and it relate anaphorically to their antecedents, Mary and help me.
antonyms, antonymy. Two words are antonymsif their meanings are opposites: hot – cold; light – dark; light - heavy.
A word may have more than one word as an antonym:cold - hot/warm; big - small/tiny/little
apostrophe. An apostrophe is a punctuation mark - a raised comma, as in John's - used to indicate either omitted letters or possession:
- Omitted letters. We use an apostrophe for the omitted letter(s) when a verb is contracted (= shortened). For example:
I'm (I am)
who's (who is/has)
they've (they have)
he'd (he had/would)
we're (we are)
it's (it is/has)
would've (would have)
she'll (she will)
In contracted negative forms, notis contracted to n'tand joined to the verb: isn't, didn't, couldn'tetc.
In formal written style, it is more usual to use the full form.
There are a few other cases where an apostrophe is used to indicate letters that are in some sense 'omitted' in words other than verbs, eg let's(= let us), o'clock(= of the clock).
- Possession. We also use an apostrophe for the possessive form:
my mother's car
Joe and Fiona's house
the cat's tail
James's ambition
a week's holiday
my parents' car
the children's clothes
Note that the possessive pronounsyours, his, hers, ours, theirs, and its are not written with an apostrophe.
apposition. When two words or phrases are in apposition to one another, they are simply put next to each other ('apposed') so that they can each contribute in different ways to the same meaning. For instance, in the sentence Her brother John came in, her brother is in apposition to John because they both name the same person.
article.A, anand theare articles. A(anbefore a vowel sound) is the indefinite article; the is the definite article. Articles are a type of determiner.
aspect. The difference in meaning between I was playing football at five o'clock ('progressive') and I played football at five o'clockis sometimes called aspect rather than tense because it concerns the way in which the event is described - as ongoing or complete - rather than its position in time - before or after the present moment. Similarly, the difference between a perfect form such as I have seen it and its simple equivalent I see itor I saw it can be described as aspect because the perfect locates the event in an ongoing period. These two aspect contrasts combine freely with the contrast of tense to define eight distinct tense-aspect forms. (See tense.)
Aspect plays a particularly important role in Slavonic languages such as Russian, but these languages make rather different semantic distinctions from English.
attributive. See adjective.
auxiliary verb. In They were talking, the verb were is called an 'auxiliary' verb because it ‘supports’ the verb talking by helping to define its grammatical characteristics such astense, aspect and voice. This 'supporting' role explains the term 'auxiliary' (think 'auxiliary nurse'), but this term is problematic for two reasons.
- Not every verb that supports another verb in this way is called an auxiliary verb. For example, get and keep can both be used before talking (as in They got talking or They kept talking) but are not classified as auxiliary verbs because they do not share the other special characteristics that distinguish auxiliary verbs (see below). (See subject complement.)
- The term ‘auxiliary’ implies subordination, but from a grammatical point of view, it is the following verb that is subordinate to the auxiliary verb, and not the other way round. In a sequence such as were talking, it is the auxiliary verb that is finite (past-tensewere), whereas the second verb is not (participletalking), and it is the auxiliary verb that determines the form of the next verb (because be takes a participle), rather than the other way round. In most modern analyses, therefore, the second verb is grammatically subordinate to the auxiliary.
Auxiliary verbs are a special class of verbs which can not only be used to support another verb, but have other special grammatical characteristics. These characteristics vary from language to language. In English, auxiliary verbs are those that allow 'negation' and 'inversion':
- negation: modified by not or n't,as in They weren't talking (but not: *They gotn't talking)
- inversion: placed before their subject, as in Were they talking? (but not: *Got they talking?)
As you can see, werepasses this test but got fails it. Similarly, had passes but keptfails: - negation: They hadn't talked. (but not: *They keptn't talking)
inversion: Had they talked? (but not: *Kept they talking?)
The English verbs that pass these tests are:
- bein all uses, even when followed by something other than a verb (as in: They are happy)
- have when followed by a past participle (have talked) or (for some speakers and some examples) when followed by an object (as in: I haven't a clue)
- do when followed by an infinitive (as in: I don't know) - but not before an object (so not: *I didn't my homework)
- all modal verbs (as in: I can't help you, You mustn't do that.)
Auxiliary verbs can, and often do, combine with each other, as in I must have been waiting for hours.
The tests define a clear word class, which needs a name. When this word class combines with the 'supporting' function, grammarians all use the term 'auxiliary verb'; but when be and have are used in other ways, as in They are happy or I haven't a clue, many grammarians find the term misleading. However no other name has established itself for such cases, so 'auxiliary verb' may be the best option. If you do call non-supporting beand do auxiliary verbs, it is important to remember that this term names a wordclass, not afunction.(Contrast main verb.)
backshift. When It’s Tuesday today is reported as You said it was Tuesday today, the change of tense from present to past is called ‘backshift’. Notice how the past was no longer has it’s usual deictic meaning, because It was Tuesday today doesn’t make sense. Backshift is found in subordinate clauses that are subordinate to a main clause whose verb is in the past tense.
base. A word’s base is themorpheme, or combination of morphemes,from which the word was built by some change such as the addition of an affix. For instance, in friendly and friends, the morpheme friend is the base, to which the affixes –ly and –s have been added; and in blackbirds the base is blackbird which in turn can be divided into two bases:black and bird. A word’s base is sometimes called its ‘stem’, and in schools, bases are often called ‘root words’.
blend. A blend is a word derived from the start of one word and the end of another:
pictionary = picture + dictionary
smog = smoke + fog
brunch = breakfast + lunch
borrow, borrowing. The speakers of one language may ‘borrow’ words from another. For instance, the word origami is a borrowing (or loan word) from Japanese, meaning that English speakers use the word as if it was an ordinary English word, even if they know that it was originally Japanese.
cardinal numeral. E.g. one, two, three, … Cardinal numerals are the basic numerals, in contrast with ordinal numerals such as first, second and third.
case. In some languages, nouns and pronouns have different forms to show their grammatical function as subject, object and so on. English has the vestiges of a former case system in the personal pronouns, where Iand she are used as subjects but me and her as objects (I saw her and she saw me). In German and Latin the case system is well developed and applies even to modifying adjectives; for example, German der kleine Junge (the small boy) is the 'nominative' case used as subject, in contrast with the 'accusative' case den kleinen Jungen which is used as object (so: Der kleine Junge schläft, 'The small boy is sleeping', but: Ich kenne den kleinen Jungen, 'I know the small boy'). The traditional names for the cases in a language such as German are: