present perfect tense A tense which refers to past events. In English,
these events would often have some link with the present whereas in
German, the present perfect tense is used irrespectively of how long
ago events occurred.
present tense The tense which refers to events in the present. In English,
there are three forms: ‘I work’, I am working’ and ‘I do work’. In
German, there is only one form: ich arbeite.
pronouns These are words such as personal pronouns which can replace
nouns: ‘The woman sings’ →‘Shesings’. There are also other pronouns
like ‘everybody’, ‘this’, ‘nothing’. See also reflexive verbs.
reflexive verbs These verbs take a (reflexive) pronoun such as ‘myself ’,
‘himself ’ which refers back to the subject: ‘I introduced myself’.
regular verbs A type of verb that changes its personal endings and tense
forms according to a regular pattern.
separable verbs These verbs have a prefix such as ‘an’, ‘zurück’, ‘mit’,
which can detach itself from the verb and move to the end of the
clause:ankommen–Wir kommen um acht Uhr an. See also insepar-
able verbs.
simple past tense Indicates that an action took place in the past. In
English, it normally refers to actions completed in the past: ‘Last year,
Iwentto Austria’.
singular A term referring to the number of a noun, i.e. one person or
one thing.
stem You get the stem of a verb by taking away -e(n)from the infini-
tive:mach-en. Therefore machis the stem of the verb machen.
subject Part of the sentence that refers to the ‘doer’ of what is happening:
‘The motherfeeds the baby’; ‘Her knowledge impressed everybody’.
subject–verb inversion This is the term for a change in word order that
happens when a main clause starts with an element other than the
subject:Er gehtheute Abend aus →Heute Abend geht eraus.
subjunctive A form of the verb which often expresses a wish, a possi-
bility or an imagined situation: ‘Wish you were here!’; ‘If I won
the lottery I’d collect vintage cars’. See also Konjunktiv I and
Konjunktiv II.
subordinate clause This clause is linked to a main clause and cannot
stand on its own: ‘She couldn’t sleep although she was very tired’. In
German, the finite verb of the subordinate clause has to move to the
very end:Sie konnte nicht schlafen, obwohl sie sehr müde war.
superlative Form of the adjective or adverb used to describe that some-
one or something is ‘the greatest’, the most beautiful’ etc.
tenses These are forms of the verb indicating whether the action is taking
place in the present, past or future.
Glossary of grammatical terms 213
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