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English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar, orthography, and word-use, especially between different English-speaking countries.
Some sources, such as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, use determiner as a term for a category as defined above and determinative for the function that determiners and possessives typically perform in a noun phrase (see § Functions).
Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees".
Words such as so can occur only as predicative intensifiers, [3] and others, such as -ass, typically are used only as attributive intensifiers: [4] a. The car is so expensive. - Predicative intensifier b. *the so expensive car [note 1] - Attributive intensifier (not grammatically correct, not used) a. *Today was cold-ass.
The word "inflammable" can be derived by two different constructions, both following standard rules of English grammar: appending the suffix -able to the word inflame creates a word meaning "able to be inflamed", while adding the prefix in-to the word flammable creates a word meaning "not flammable".