Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Check Questions Check Questions 1 Discuss how it is possible to conceive of linguistic knowledge and what is meant by the ‘gramm ...

Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words
Exercise 2 Identify the arguments in the following sentences. (1) a Peter left his ...

Test your knowledge l Peter has broken a vase. m It surprised everyone that the visitors arrived. n They wondered what to do. o ...

Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words
Exercise 7 Mark the morphological boundaries and state whether the underlined morph ...

Test your knowledge
Exercise 10 Identify the word categories in the following sentences and give the lexical entries of the ve ...

Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words
Exercise 13 Give the lexical entries of each predicate of the following sentences. ...

Chapter 2 Grammatical Foundations: Structure 1 Structure 1.1 The building blocks of sentences So far we have been discussing the ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure (3) sentence Kate claimed Geoff jeopardised the expedition If it is grammatical f ...

Structure achieve nothing and we would be better off not adding it and keeping things simpler. Moreover, why would we want to ma ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure a noun. But what status do these sequences of words have in the sentence? It seem ...

Structure (12) S P P the postwoman pestered P the doctor We see here that the sentence has even more internal structure as a phr ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure (17) a the postwoman [pestered the doctor] b the postwoman [thinks the doctor is ...

Structure (21) S P P the postwoman thinks S P P the doctor said S she P has P the flu So far we have looked at sentences which a ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure (25) S P P the diagnosis S worried P that she P the postwoman had P the flu Of co ...

Structure Again, we cannot identify the position of the verb within the phrase in terms of linear order, but in terms of the str ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure The way this works is that each constituent is surrounded by square brackets and ...

Structure head of phrases such as the postwoman is the determiner and the head of phrases such as on his birthday is the preposi ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure Although the system of rules in (36) is capable of describing the structures of a ...

Grammatical Functions We call the argument that precedes the VP in the sentence the subject. Besides its privileged position in ...

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure other positions English pronouns have the accusative form (me, him, her, us, them ...