English User`s Manual Welcome to Part One Chapter
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1. The lamp which was throwing light through the doorway It could have been past the doorway Instead of location this type of preposition tells us about movement about direction along up down towards These prepositions link verbs in this case was throwing with nouns or pronouns in this case the doorway An aside here for you clever nerds who like to ask awkward questions No the preposition through does not link light and the doorway Right you say Tell us just what job the word light does do here 16 Walk into the swimming baths from the bus stop and swim in the pool once you get there For a moment I pause not because I haven t got the answer right up my sleeve but because I am a kind teacher and just for a second or two I will allow you to think that you have caught me out But you haven t The word ight tells me what the lamp was throwing Light is the object of the verb was throwing and the lamp is the subject of the verb and this should be enough to shut you up until we encounter these terms again in a later chapter Now the rest of you can pay attention again so that we can finish prepositions What is the difference between falling in the shower and falling into the shower Could the shower door remain closed in both cases How would you get Charlie the class cartoonist to draw each scenario In is a preposition of location while into is a preposition of direction or2. movement so falling in the shower is possible without the door being opened whereas the door would have to be open if someone was going to fall into the shower for the movement the fall would have to begin outside the shower and finish inside I am assuming here that there is some sort of roof or top to the shower If this is beginning to sound like something from a detective novel it might just be that words and the ways that we use them can be a very important matter May it please Your Honour Counsel for the defence was not having an easy day He let his hands rest on preposition of location the table in front of him and turned his gaze towards preposition of movement the defendant The evidence put before you shows quite conclusively that the door of the shower had jammed and that the deceased s fall took place inside preposition of location the shower I put it to Your Honour that the accused could not have pushed the deceased into preposition of movement the shower even had he wanted to I could go on But I won t It s nearly time for an adjournment a pause I once dreamt about ice cream What did my dream concern It was about ice cream About links the verb dreamt with the noun ice cream This is clearly nothing to do with position or movement but with something more abstract about ideas and understanding rather like abstract nouns That s it Now I will adjourn to the garden while you complete the
3. or to particular places New York for example Exercise One Ask yourself how well you think you have followed things so far If you complete this exercise you should feel confident and that will help you move along more quickly You will find the answers towards the back of the book When you check your answers the important thing to do is to ensure that you understand any errors you have made i Identify the nouns in these sentences and decide which type each one represents a Aeroplanes are expensive b Aeroplanes are expensive items c Fleets of aeroplanes are very expensive d British Airways shares are cheap e British Airways have been praised for their efficiency ii Still unsure Test and teach yourself Make your own list of nouns decide in which category each one belongs then check with a dictionary iii Now try something a little more demanding a All cows eat grass b Teachers of music use this sentence as a mnemonic pronounced newmonic to help their pupils remember the notes on lines of written music c Players in a band have to respond to melody harmony and rhythm if they are to succeed If they do this well the result can be great enjoyment if not there is cacophony You should have found a total of 18 nouns in section iii counting one noun twice By now I hope that you are getting the hang of my way of explaining things We need to move on We still have to examine seven more kinds of words par
4. If the foreigner points at the sheep and says animal we cannot shake our heads and tell him that he is wrong That would be confusing for him it s not his fault that he doesn t realize that we want him to use the word for this Sheep a particular animal Animal could be a horse or a sheep or a rabbit Common nouns nouns names things school teacher label particular animal sheep So how are we going to teach both words so that our pupil learns to use both of them properly Remember the key thing is to set things up so that he cannot get things wrong This is where you are now trying to stand outside our language thinking about it in a different way learning how it works Finding answers to this sort of question is something that teachers enjoy a challenge to the brain If I was teaching on a farm or in a zoo it would be easy to show that all of the creatures there could be called animals but only particular animals those with long snouts big ears and curly tails and called Percy could be called pigs One answer would be to use pictures in a book on a sketch pad or on a white board You can probably think up ideas of your own and that way you will be getting outside your language Just to be technical for a moment animal here is a general word used to bring together several particular words such as goat and sheep At another level animal can be used as a particular word along with bird and r
5. following Exercise Six Try identifying all the prepositions in this paragraph which you have already met and decide which type they are Prepositions well start by thinking about position What position are you in Sitting probably but on something a chair a settee perhaps a table or a bed or standing perhaps in a bookshop or at a bus stop There may be someone sitting 17 next to you or beside you and the lamp above you may be a good one but not as good as the one which is throwing light through the doorway over there where your friend is leaning against the wall waiting for you to go down the road to the pub Answers to Exercise Six about links the verb thinking with the noun position in links the verb are with the noun position on links the pronoun you implied from the previous sentence to the pronoun something in links you the same you to bookshop at links you to bus stop next to links you to sitting beside links you to sitting above links lamp to you through links the verb is throwing with the noun doorway over links the lamp which is throwing light with the pronoun there the place where your friend is leaning against links is leaning with the wall down links to go with the road Here think of down as meaning along to links to go with the pub Now check that you understand any mistakes before celebrating your successes Next we have Try reading this next paragraph aloud I d
6. hoped that Mummy would get rich first so Billy would have all Mummy s money when eventually Mummy died One of the reasons that this sounds like baby talk is that children learn more slowly about pronouns and continue to use ordinary nouns especially proper nouns until they have done so Even with pronouns where we would normally find them this little piece still sounds a bit creepy Roald Dahl comes to mind but it is now an adult voice even if it has put some troubling ideas into a young man s head Try reading it again Mummy took away Billy s ice cream He cried One day she would die The thought cheered him up no end and he hoped that she would get rich first so he would have all her money when eventually she died Mummy Billy proper nouns That s it really I me my and mine are words that we all use in reference to ourselves when we do things when things are done to us when we refer to something that belongs to us You can imagine a mad teacher who has an ice cream fetish He she him me my mine you yours pronouns 13 Words to form questions who whom whose which what I like ice cream Give me one and IJ will probably let you finish early Yes that s my ice cream not yours Yes and all those are mine too Exercise Five Besides the six italicised pronouns in the above sentence there are four others Can you identify them Remember they all stand for somet
7. red or green handle or the particular police officers whom you did not want to meet again 19 The indefinite articles a indicates here to any feather duster which is not yours and some to any police officers who were not attacked by you when you were armed with a banana in Downing Street An is simply used instead of a when the word that follows begins with one of the five vowels Try saying a orange The word comes from the Spanish naranja so perhaps we should say a norange You can imagine somebody in the market Lovely noranges Four for a quid For you it was important to convince the court that the feather duster shown in evidence was not the feather duster which lived under your stairs As you leave the court you will probably take care to avoid any police officers especially the officers whom you met in Downing Street that night Case dismissed Finally Exclamations interjections things that sound like words and anything else that occurs to me before we get to the end of this chapter But first there follows a This section contains words and expressions that we often hear and see but which some of us dislike They are part of the language even if we only notice them uncontrolled in public places It is a fact that some people express themselves excessively in language which other people find coarse or foul or blasphemous but these are words and the way they are used needs to be understood as part of a
8. A sentence 1 400 words English User s Manual Welcome to Part One Chapter One Words and their Work 1 Sounds that mean something and become words Different jobs for different words parts of speech Words are the basic units of language with which we communicate Sometimes a word is enough on its own Stop Someone is telling you what to do There might be a crash or simply an appearance before the local magistrates if you don t but stop you must Just one word Sometimes a lot more words are used in a sentence Count the words in each sentence in the first paragraph eleven nine seven twenty and three No the last three words in the paragraph do not form a sentence but I have made them look like one I will explain later but for now it s important to realise that sentences can be very short or very long One of the language s longest sentences is to be found in James Joyce s Ulysses It s just over a page long about four hundred words I will return to sentences clauses and phrases later Now we must go back to basics to words Words are sounds or groups of sounds that enable us to mean things and to convey or communicate these meanings to other people Some of our ancestors found that they could change and vary basic animal sounds so that we have far more sounds to use as signals By stretching and twisting our mouths and our tongues we can form human or articulate speech Think of a bird s eye vi
9. age to see how the components words work together Now we must move on and see what Billy is up to I wonder how Mummy s getting on Read this Billy remembered the moment when Mummy took away his ice cream She was found dead behind the nursery where she had left 14 him Her body was discovered by his best friend who had seen the Kalashnikov which Billy had hidden in the push chair Billy s probation officer whom he had attacked with an ice lolly only the previous week came smiling to take him away Some questions What are we told about The moment Billy remembered The nursery His best friend The Kalashinikov Billy s probation officer Now try removing this information from the passage Billy remembered the moment when Mummy took away his ice cream She was found dead behind the nursery where she had left him Her body was discovered by his best friend who had seen the Kalashnikov which Billy had hidden in the push chair Billy s probation officer whom he had attacked with an ice lolly only the previous week came smiling to take him away And you are left with Billy remembered the moment She was found dead behind the nursery Her body was discovered by his best friend Billy s probation officer came smiling to take him away All the pieces of additional information which I have now removed from the passage are related to the main part of each sentence They are joined by relative pronoun
10. ding a page of a book silently to yourself You ll probably take about a minute possibly less Then try reading it aloud To do this you will take about three minutes a speed erans of about one hundred words per minute faster than mouth When Angela Ripon read the news on BBC television she had to be slowed down once her reading speed reached 120 words per minute Up to that speed viewers could take in what she was telling them When you read silently you are taking in words three times as quickly something we have only been able to do in English for about six hundred years although we have been writing in English for about fifteen hundred years So what you are doing now is incredibly clever your brain can think much faster than your mouth can speak and you can now begin to appreciate even more the importance of the written language it enables us to take in information incredibly rapidly it communicates despite the writer s absence and it provides a record Now we are back to your concern to use the written language as well as you can and the basics Words Words join together in phrases or sentences to form language and carry meaning Some words like pencil have an obvious meaning we can point to things like pencils and say the word and we have conveyed the idea even to someone who does not speak English Similarly we can point to a sheep and teach the name for it but how then would we teach someone the word animal
11. e purpose by Muslims A little complication now there are always complications with our language this and that these and those In class I would point to one student and say something like This boy at the front of the class and that boy at the back of the class may go home early There would follow an argument about just which boys I meant for they would all want to go home early The words this and that simply enable me to demonstrate exactly which boys are to go home early just as yellow and green enabled me to indicate particular pencils These and those are the plural forms of this and that they are demonstrative adjectives And a further complication these four words can also function as pronouns to which we will come shortly Exercise Two i Identify the adjectives in these sentences a Tigers are impressive animals b They stacked the wooden chairs c Fleets of aeroplanes are very expensive d From the air they could see the grey water below them e His curly hair impressed the girl Now try something a little more demanding Each of these sentences contains more than one adjective Some of them are not straightforward like matters of shape or colour ii Identify the adjectives in these sentences a The best aeroplanes are expensive b All the men helped to stack the wooden chairs c Future requirements for the military will be difficult to justify d Buy cheap sell dear e British Airways have been praised
12. ed coughing fit can of course bring a difficult conversation to a complete halt So far so good Parts of speech try to remember Nouns name things Adjectives qualify nouns Verbs indicate the action the heart of a sentence Adverbs qualify verbs and adjectives Pronouns stand in for nouns Prepositions link nouns or nouns and verbs Conjunctions join words and groups of words Articles make clear the identity of things There are also interjections and swear words and we will return to them later with oaths as well Well done Next words in groups How words work together 22
13. ed to join the last two items in a list As we read it signals the end of the list and we are ready to stop Read the rest of this sentence aloud so far we have tackled nouns adjectives adverbs verbs pronouns prepositions and conjunctions Conjunctions done We have touched already on the business of articles in the introduction so all we have to do now is make sure that we have dealt with all four of them a an some and the Articles precede nouns to indicate whether particular things are being referred to or not I am afraid that you are due in court again A court official holds up a large old fashioned feather duster Is this asks the judge is this the feather duster you kept at home and which the prosecution claim was used by you to attack the prime minister You are relieved for it is simply a feather duster and not your old feather duster which had a green handle not a red one and you explain that the feather duster which you kept under the stairs at your home was destroyed at a fancy dress party weeks before the alleged attack Wonderful you re not guilty They can t touch you As the judge dismisses the case some police officers enter the court That s all right they re just coppers Then you notice that among them are the officers whom you attacked with a banana the night you were arrested in Downing Street The the definite article which refers to particular things the feather duster with the
14. een going on for some time by the time you reach the end of this section This is the future past continuous tense Yes that s quite right future will past have continuous been and the ing at the end of studying We can say these things and we can write them down With a bit of practice we will do so without thinking or worrying about it This I hope is as difficult as things will get 10 Elsewhere you will find this information about words set out in a systematic tabular way In this chapter I am simply trying to show the different kinds of words that we use The trouble is that words get mixed up with each other very quickly and if we are not careful we lose control of the damned things and we say things that we did not mean to say This can be embarrassing or just plain annoying but it happens and we would like it to happen less often and that may well be why we are studying the language My aunt s neighbour once placed a small ad in their local paper Wanted Home for cross collie Walks on lead Clean Easy to feed A day or two later my aunt phoned her neighbour and said that she was from the RSPCA Why she demanded to know why was the collie cross We are going to remove the adverb from the sentence that follows Mr Blair resigned cheerfully Now look again Mr Blair resigned Doubtless you could find replacements hastily sneakily craftily honourably These adverbs could be used to qualify the verb res
15. eptile while we are using creature as a general word Just as goats pigs and sheep are all animals so animals reptiles and birds are all creatures General words hold together groups of particular words Brain hurting yet Just think of all these animals running about in a classroom full of children Not much teaching would get done For that we need simple pictures of the animals and the names of the animals labels written underneath What I m trying to show you here is the range of jobs that words can do on their own before they start to operate with other words So far we have dealt only one kind of nouns the common noun There are also proper nouns collective nouns and abstract nouns Nouns are all names of things I want you to imagine being at school at the age of about twelve A slightly mad young teacher has handed each of you some old fashioned card luggage labels the sort that has a hole at one end so that you can tie it to something The teacher has been talking about nouns and naming or labelling things and asks you to write as many of the names of things in the room as you can each on a separate label When you have finished you are going to fasten the labels to the things to which they apply The teacher has extra string sellotape and blue tack to help you with this So decide now which nouns are you going to fix as labels on things that are in the room This is where we find out whether you were trouble at school T
16. essed with this goal Oh shit They missed Here the word is nothing to do with them or what they missed it s simply a reaction to the fact that they missed Like indeed damn really or God the word has a meaning something to which it refers Later I will return to the origin and influence of words such as these But for the moment it is sufficient to recognise that here they are simply used as a reaction to something and we call them exclamations words that are called out in reaction to something Latin ex out and clamo I call Our modern clamour a lot of calling out Interjections are sounds or words that are thrown in between real words Imagine that you are in very serious trouble You are very young and very keen not to be caught out This could so easily have been two of us at school playing firemen in the boys toilet which had no roof at the age of five Soon we found ourselves outside the headmistress s office while she spoke to an angry woman who had been showered as she walked along the pavement outside You struggle to explain and there is a loud Hmmmm from one of the adults and you realise that you are simply digging yourself in deeper 21 Hmmmm here is a warning that someone does not believe you and that you might as well own up straight away and save everyone a lot of time Er a good one for really awkward questions and direct accusations Oooh for a large bill and a really well tim
17. ew of an articulated lorry swerving sharply one way then another Try making simple animal sounds You will find that most animal sound is represented by the five letters which we call vowels a e i o u A good one to try is the mooing of a cow The best way to imitate the sound of a cow mooing is to open your mouth but let the sound come down your nose most cows leave out the m Then try reading this paragraph aloud very slowly very clearly and 44 sounds ie very carefully like a television newsreader or like someone who is 26 letters i trying to make a deaf person understand Now you are also using very carefully the sounds represented by the remaining twenty one letters of the alphabet These letters represent the ways that we shape our mouths when we speak These letters we call consonants with the sound They tell us how to shape our mouths as we make the sounds of our language Try looking at your mouth in a mirror and watch closely as you say Tit Bumble then Lilly Essentially these twenty six letters our alphabet enable us to write down the sounds of speech to make a visual record of what we say As you read this you are actually using a sophisticated system for converting visual signs into speech Your brain reacts to these signs so quickly that you do not have time to speak them out loud but you understand them as clearly as if you were listening to someone speaking aloud Time yourself rea
18. ey form a question such as Do you like ice cream Another example Can he swim uses a different verb the verb to be able I can etc In the case of has happened the additional verb is the verb to have which marks a past tense something that has taken place already She has texted him five times this morning and it s only half past seven These extra verbs are used as auxiliary verbs Auxi um Latin for help or assistance Auxiliary verbs combined with an ordinary verb form compound verbs e g was working is trying and will succeed Before we go on my putting words in brackets like you in the paragraph above or underlining them or putting them in italics These are my way of using the language at the same time that I am trying to analyse it If my wife ever reads this she will call it multi tasking Exercise Three Here are a few sentences with compound verbs identify the auxiliaries then ask yourself about the information or understanding that the word brings to the sentence a William was smiling By next week will have been enjoying ice cream for over fifty years They don t smile here He couldn t wait She might have waited Can it be eo aes Answers to Exercise Three a Was indicates a continuous action in the past b Don t do not negates the verb smiling is something they do not do C Couldn t could not indicates an inability to do something in the
19. for their efficiency Answers Exercise Two impressive wooden expensive grey curly Ooo 0 oa g Best a superlative better than anything else Expensive All number every one Wooden Future difficult Cheap dear Praised their a possessive adjective which tells us whose efficiency is involved ooaaogo Now check that you understand any mistakes before celebrating your successes Do you remember Stop When I ask students how many words you need to form a sentence the answers can be great fun I rarely get the correct response One one verb We can t stop now but we do need at least to slow down while we deal with this very important kind of word the verb This is the word that tells us what is happening or has happened or will happen There is of course an exception here the verb to be tells us something about the state of the world Boys and girls are different rather than about an action Odd one out to be More like an equals sign You are about to be thrown in at the deep end There is no other way but then I trust you are capable determined and learning fast Tell me can you try identifying the verbs in the previous paragraph that begins Do you remember There are sixteen of them Here is the same paragraph with the verbs underlined Do you remember Stop When I ask kids how many words you need to form a sentence the answers ca
20. ghly with the effects of using words in particular ways in a later chapter Well start by thinking about position What position are you in Sitting probably but on something a chair a settee perhaps a table or a bed or standing perhaps in a bookshop or at a bus stop There may be someone sitting next to you or beside you and the lamp above you may be a good one but not as good as the one which is throwing light through the doorway over there where your friend is leaning against the wall waiting for you to go down to the pub You would not have been through the chair but you might have been in the bed and possibly spread along the settee You might even have been under the table Let s start now by applying the Inson technique to this last sentence and remove one word under You might even have been the table Off the This sentence makes sense but only grammatically We know of course that you could never really be a table so for the sentence to for make practical sense another word is needed a word such as above discussion This word or others like it under next to a phrase that functions as On the a preposition by opposite would all make sense They are tables an prepositions which tell us about the position of things on the table offer behind the door and so on These prepositions link two nouns or Under the pronouns we saw him on the bike table not table dr nk Other prepositions tell us about movement
21. gp Answers Exercise Four Slowly qualifies the verb limped Cautiously qualifies the verb approached Well qualifies the verb cooked Very qualifies the adjective expensive Almost qualifies the adverb completely which qualifies the adjective bald oano o 12 f Barely qualifies the verb was breathing g Barely qualifies the adjective alive Note how sentences f and g seem to say almost the same thing For our purposes it is important to see how the language can be used like this In the first sentence our attention is directed towards the lack of breathing perhaps as a nurse or a doctor might observe a patient In the second sentence the writer might be anticipating a death or arguments about the teacher s will There remain pronouns prepositions conjunctions articles exclamations and things that sound like words As we shall see in the next chapter where there will be a sort of fancy dress party for words all these different kinds of words have their jobs to do For the moment I am simply going to identify them as quickly and as easily as possible Mummy took away Billy s ice cream He cried One day she would die He and she are pronouns They stand for nouns pro Latin for or on behalf of Without pronouns speech would be very laborious try reading the next sentence aloud Mummy took away Billy s ice cream Billy cried One day Mummy would die The thought cheered up Billy no end and Billy
22. h his label It could have been one of the nerds or perhaps some smart kid wanting to catch out this new teacher but it s one of the girls this time Her word is bored She stands in front of the teacher all wriggle and pout and hands on her hips Sort this out then clever clogs You can imagine her saying the words but she doesn t The teacher takes her label and picks up a pencil He changes the word boredom That do he asks and the girl nods Charlie Charlie is one of nature s artists his cartoons appear in the school magazine and other places when no one s watching Charlie can you help us out mate You remember teachers always friendly when they want a favour The teacher explains something to Charlie who gets to work on the large whiteboard Soon there is another class of students in front of you all of them slumped on their desks ignoring a match stick figure of a teacher who is talking on and on in front of them Not one of them is taking any notice one is patting his mouth in an obvious gesture to the teacher who ignores him Your teacher hands back the girl s altered label and she sticks it on the white board Even someone who did not speak English would realise what was what The word is like the label on a painting or a photograph and we know that it tells pe Z us about the idea that the picture or photograph suggests not about the things that are in the i i picture It de
23. he teacher walks around the class looking at your choice of nouns If you have written words like door or desk or even student that s fine and you can fasten your labels onto something or someone straight away However if you have prepared labels for certain body parts located between the shoulders and the crutch then you will be made to wait to one side with your labels Later your teacher will tell you to give up 3 the label to someone else in the class who will then label your private bits rather than someone else s and you will have learnt that you are going to take notice of this teacher Someone has written friend on his label but no one wants to be his friend so the teacher gets the boy to give the label to one of the girls who finds another girl to stand still long enough for her to tie the label to her wrist long enough to be her friend Someone has written class The teacher pauses for a moment then reaches for the string and snips off a long long piece He gives it to the student who hands one end to another student who is standing at the edge of the room While the others watch he walks around all of them letting out the string as he goes Back to the first student he takes both ends of the string and pulls them as tightly as he can Could this be you the class joker His victims wriggle and try to push each other onto the floor but they are tied together in a group a class and the joker is absolutely right wit
24. hing or someone Answer to Exercise Five The additional pronouns are one also functions as a noun and as an adjective you that in that s and those That and those both refer to ice creams Earlier we met the four demonstrative adjectives this that these and those We talked about this boy and that boy Now look at another way of using these words That s the one I d like Automatically we look for someone to point at something to indicate which bunch of flowers or picture or ice cream that has been chosen These four words function as pronouns standing in for a noun but also enabling us to demonstrate which particular one we are talking about This ice cream is delicious this is rubbish This ice cream is delicious Demonstrative adjective This is rubbish Demonstrative pronoun Coupled with a noun these words are demonstrative adjectives alone they are demonstrative pronouns Then how about Who won the prize The woman who cooked the best pizza When we ask the question Who won the prize we need a word that stands in for someone we don t know The word who does just that Here it functions as an interrogative pronoun Other words can function in this way whom whose which and what e g Whose watch is this Tracey s Whom do you prefer Kerry Many people just say Who do you prefer What do you want An ice cream Which one The vanilla please A reminder we are examining our langu
25. igned Remember qualify If you want to qualify the noun Blair what kind of noun that s right a proper noun you could qualify Blair with an adjective so that we would read Cheerful hasty sneaky crafty honourable Mr Blair resigned How do you study To concentrate on the man we use adjectives To concentrate on the way he does things we use adverbs The adverb cheerfully adds to what the verb tells us that he resigned Now we know how he resigned cheerfully Carefully Determinedly Obviously the sort of people we are and the way we do things are linked but we can choose to shift the emphasis from person to action We could go further Crafty Mr Blair resigned cheerfully but one of Peter Brookes cartoons in The Times following the Nantwich by election in the spring of 2008 probably catches this much better it shows New Labour as The Titanic trying to re launch itself from the ocean floor while Tony Blair in the guise of a fish swims away grinning all the while Slightly There is another function that adverbs have to modify adjectives hurt Almost 11 perfect and other adverbs I have italicised the adverbs in the next two sentences This shirt is clearly red my wife tells me she thinks I m colour blind I put down the shirt very slowly and ask myself why I have agreed to go shopping with her The shirt is not simply red it is obviously red or should be to anyone who is not blind o
26. n be great fun I rarely get the correct response One one verb We can t stop now but we do need at least to slow down while we deal with this very important kind of word the verb This is the word that tells us what is happening or has happened or will happen There is of course an exception here the verb to be tells us something about the state of the world rather than about an action There are three questions about verbs which should have revealed themselves by now The first question concerns the grammatical sense of action This does not simply mean some physical event that we can see or hear It can also refer to a mental action for example when we think about something The words we do need at least to slow down from the last paragraph show that I had thought about something the speed with which I was presenting ideas to you That was why I decided to slow down My mind had been active In grammar the idea of an action is much wider and includes events that would not be thought of as action in the ordinary common sense sort of way Grammatical action hope West Ham win The second question involves the verbs that follow the word to To form and to slow Worry about down later These are very straightforward They are the names of verbs of actions We call them infinitives and they are incomplete verbs incomplete because there is no indication whether the action has already taken
27. n examination of our language To do this we need to refer to these words even if we do not use them Think of them clinically like a disease if you like that we need to study however unpleasant it may be Oh shit You have stepped backwards into the wet concrete that you have just laid and staggered all over it The footprints that you have left behind 20 laugh at you and so do your mates Or you have just realised that you have left the keys inside the car which you locked before you shut the rear door Sometimes it is different quicker Shit An own goal in extra time or the slipping of a sharp knife in the kitchen Links between words and meanings are not always fixed and a dictionary will tell of shit s basic meaning excrement Poo in baby vocabulary or turds if you don t want to sound posh The word shit is more often met in speech where there is greater flexibility rather than in writing In speech it is rarely used to stand for excrement Look at all that shit Here the word is obviously a noun standing for something but what A pile of manure a place full of rubbish or anything or anyone that we don t like Then try That was a shit goal A sports fan suffers disappointment and uses the word as a sort of adjective but it tells us little about the goal whether it was easy or impressive All we know is that for some reason that is not clear to us the speaker was not impr
28. past He may be able to do it now Can you see how I have used a similar construction here to explain the answer May indicates the possibility that he can wait now d Can indicates an ability in the present Reversing the order of Can and it the sentence is made into a question If you enjoy this sort of thing look for more compound verbs in newspapers magazines and books If you don t make sure that you understand this before you continue even if that means re reading the section on verbs or reading about verbs elsewhere Sometimes another way of explaining something will do the trick We are close to finishing work on this most important of words the verb Nothing happened is a sentence and like all sentences it depends on having a verb In this case the verb is happened which tells us what happened grammatically amongst the words although as we are told nothing really did happen What happened grammatically is that a statement was made nothing happened and this statement told us that nothing had occurred or taken place By the time you reach the end of this section you will have been studying several types of word Tell me how many auxiliary verbs did I use in the previous sentence The answer is three will and have indicate that the action of this verb studying will be complete at some time in the future and been with working rather than work alone tells us that the action was continuous that it will have b
29. pends on our understanding of what we can see of knowing that bored people put their heads down and yawn It s an abstract idea pulled away from the actual things that we can see Then the teacher tells the class to pick up one more blank label each and write their own name on them When they have done this he collects them up shuffles them and walks around the room sticking them onto windows walls and doors turned so the names cannot be seen Now the each student has to find his or her label and there is chaos for several moments Eventually everyone has the right one Some of them cling to their labels as if they are their personal property and refuse to show the others and the class realises that there is only one place for each label Each of you says the teacher has your own piece of property They are puzzled so the school is giving away luggage labels but they listen as he explains what proper nouns do they name particular individuals they label a particular sort of uniqueness What has the teacher taught the class What have you learned from this There are four kinds of nouns Common nouns refer to ordinary things such as mushrooms stars and names Collective nouns refer to groups of things herds of cows packs of wolves Abstract nouns refer to our understandings of things boredom friendship justice and pain Proper nouns are like property they belong to particular people John Smith
30. place is taking place or will take place and there is no indication of who or what it was that did the action They are best regarded as the names of the verbs which are incomplete The word infinite is related to the French word fin which means end and our word final originally Latin finis The infinitive a verb s name or title Compound verbs formed with auxiliary verbs Some of the verbs in the first paragraph of this section are single words stop ask need get deals is tells is tells Here is the same paragraph again with all the verbs emboldened Do you remember Stop When I ask students how many words you need to form a sentence the answers can be great fun I rarely get the correct response One one verb We can t stop now but we do need at least to slow down while we deal with this very important kind of word the verb These are actions that happen and are no trouble to us what happened He or they or we stopped asked needed something was or whatever The third question concerns the puzzle I left for you which comprises the verbs that are formed with more than one word that appear in a phrase do you remember can be can t stop do need is happening has happened will happen Here there is more than just the simple action Do is a verb in its own right we do things Combined with the word that tells us who or what is doing the action in this case you th
31. r stupid and is clearly unsuitable as my wife has tried to point out Here all three adverbs simply obviously and clearly are modifying the adjectives red and unsuitable Very and slowly are both adverbs Slowly qualifies the verb put down it tells us how I put down the shirt Very is an unusual adverb it is only used to modify adjectives and other adverbs It functions as an intensifier here it tells us how slowly indeed I put down the shirt which I really liked Ordinary adverbs also work like this as modifiers For example fairly in Surely the shirt is not totally unsuitable for the colour will fade fairly quickly as I work out in the garden whenever I can You should note that adverbs are often formed from adjectives quick quickly charming charmingly In these and many other examples the letters y are added to the end of the adjective to form the adverb Ending like this one are the remains of a link to the German word lich which means ike In both German and English the noun friend German freund becomes the adjective friendly or freundlich Well done the moment adverbs finished for Exercise Four Identify the adverbs in these sentences and indicate what they qualify She limped slowly along the road Cautiously he approached his mother in law It was cooked well Fleets of aeroplanes are very expensive He is almost completely bald The teacher was barely breathing The teacher was barely alive mmo ao
32. reamt once that ice cream tasted of fried tomatoes This had a devastating effect on me For months afterwards I was unable to eat the stuff Eventually I had to force myself to buy an ice cream to break the dream Then I returned enthusiastically to Rossi s ice cream parlour Rossi s had been my favourite maker of ice cream for years We can improve things I dreamt once that ice cream tasted of fried tomatoes and this had a devastating effect on me For months afterwards I was unable to eat the stuff so eventually I had to force myself to buy an ice cream to break the dream Then I returned enthusiastically to Rossi s ice cream parlour because Rossi s had been my favourite for years and I no longer dreaded eating ice cream 18 Three words and so and because make this passage easier to read The first two sentences are simple statements of fact and we can absorb them more quickly once they are linked by and and we no longer have to pause after the word tomatoes So links two sentences in which the action in the second sentence follows from the grammatical action in the first In the third pair because links the action in the first part of the sentence with the reason for that action which we find in the second part of the sentence because Rossi s had been my favourite ice cream parlour I had returned there In this example separate sentences which stand alone at first are combined Just remember that and is also us
33. s when where who which and whom These words are acting just like components in an engine They bring together bits of our language and enable it to work more efficiently Without them this is what we would have to struggle to read Billy remembered the moment Mummy took away his ice cream at that moment She was found dead behind the nursery She had left him at the nursery Her body was discovered by his best friend His best friend had seen the Kalashnikov Billy had hidden the Kalashnikov in the push chair Billy s probation officer came smiling to take him away Billy had attacked him with an ice lolly only the previous week Now we are due in court Is this the gun that you found in the push chair The judge nodded at the Kalashnikov which the usher had placed on a table in front of the witness box The Kalashnikov which had required three officers and two traffic wardens to wrestle it from Billy s grasp lay there in front of a packed court room 15 That can also function as a relative pronoun Here it relates the hidden gun to the push chair This is important for the prosecution will need to link the two It is not any gun it is that particular one Which on the other hand makes less important connections the Kalashnikov happens to be on the table and it happened to require five men to take it away from Billy What is important is that it was the gun that was found in the push chair We will deal more thorou
34. ts of speech to be technical Answers Exercise One Aeroplanes common Aeroplanes items both common fleets collective aeroplanes common British Airways proper shares common British Airways proper efficiency abstract eoa0c9F iii a Cows common grass common b Teachers music sentence mnemonic pupils notes lines music all common c Players band melody harmony rhythm result cacophony all common except enjoyment which is abstract Now check that you understand any mistakes before celebrating your successes Imagine a handful of pencils green pencils and yellow pencils The words yellow and green are used to describe the pencils I am very fussy about this old fashioned even so pay attention The words yellow and green do not describe the pencils or anything else come to that These words are adjectives used by human beings to describe things In English and other languages only humans can describe things If you get this wrong in future I will shout at you Adjectives provide additional information about things one of the pencils was yellow and another was green Adjectives are said to qualify nouns to tell us more about them an intelligent horse a kosher camel no of course I haven t checked an incredible teacher Kosher is a Hebrew word Jews use the word to indicate that something may be eaten according to their religious law The Arabic word halal is used for the sam
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