English grammar

English grammar is the set of rules that help us understand and use the English language correctly. These rules guide how we build words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and longer pieces of writing. Learning grammar helps us speak and write clearly, so others can understand what we mean.

Grammar also helps us learn new languages because many languages share similar rules. By studying English grammar, we can better understand how other languages work too. It’s like learning the secret code that makes language work!

Understanding grammar can make reading and writing fun. It helps us enjoy books, tell stories, and even play with words in poems and songs. Whether you’re writing a story, sending a message, or reading a book, good grammar makes everything easier and more enjoyable.

Overview

This article talks about the basic rules of speaking and writing Standard English, which is used in schools, news, and many other places. It covers many ways of speaking, from very formal to very casual. While there are small differences in how people speak English around the world, these are smaller than the differences in how words are pronounced or used.

Modern English has changed from older forms of the language. It uses word order, prepositions, and the "Saxon genitive or English possessive" (like -'s) to show meaning, instead of changing word endings as much as older versions of the language did. Only personal pronouns still show some of these older changes.

Word classes and phrases

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open classes – word classes that easily add new members, like the noun celebutante (a celebrity who hangs out in fashion circles). The rest are closed classes; for example, it’s rare to add new pronouns to the language. Determiners, usually grouped with adjectives, aren’t always seen as a separate type of word. Interjections are another word class, but they aren’t discussed here because they don’t fit into the usual sentence structure.

Linguists usually say there are nine English word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and exclamations. English words don’t usually change form to show their class. Sometimes a word can be more than one class. For example, run can be a verb or a noun. Words can change to show grammar, like runs, ran, runny, runner, and running. Words in one class can sometimes become words in another class, creating new words, like the noun aerobics leading to the adjective aerobicized.

Words combine to form phrases. A phrase often works like a single word from a word class. For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used like a noun, called a noun phrase. Similarly, adjectival phrases and adverbial phrases act like adjectives or adverbs. Other phrases have special names, like verb phrases, prepositional phrases, and determiner phrases.

Negation

In English, we use the word not to show that something is not true. For example, if we want to say "I do not go," we add not after a helping verb like do. If a sentence already has a helping verb, we just add not. For instance, "I am not going."

We often shorten these words, like saying don't instead of "do not" or can't instead of "cannot." Sometimes, we can put the word not after the verb in questions, like "Shouldn't he pay?"

We can also use not with other words, such as "not the right answer" or "not interesting." When we use words like never or nobody, we don’t also use not. For example, we say "I saw nothing," not "I didn’t see nothing."

Clause and sentence structure

Main article: English clause syntax

A typical sentence has one independent clause and might have more dependent clauses. Clauses usually have a subject (like a noun phrase) and a predicate (a verb phrase).

English usually follows a subject–verb–object order. This means the subject comes before the verb, and the object comes after. Sometimes, questions change this order. For example, "She can dance" becomes "Can she dance?" when asking a question. If there is no special verb, we add "do" or "does" to make the question, like "Does the milk go in the fridge?"

Questions can also start with words like "where" or "what." For example, "Where do I go?" but if the question word is the subject, we don’t change the order: "Who goes?"

History of English grammars

Main article: History of English grammars

The first book about English grammar was called Pamphlet for Grammar and was written in 1586 by William Bullokar. He wanted to show that English followed rules just like Latin, a language many people studied at the time. Bullokar’s book was based on a Latin grammar book used in schools, written by William Lily and approved by Henry VIII in 1542.

For many years after that, books about English grammar were often written in Latin, especially by scholars. The last grammar book written in Latin was Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae by John Wallis, published in 1685. Even in the early 1800s, writers like Lindley Murray had to explain that English grammar was different from older languages like Greek and Latin.

English grammar sometimes copied rules from Latin and Greek. For example, John Dryden made a rule that sentences should not end with certain small words because Latin did not allow that. Another rule, not to split certain word groups, also came from Latin, which did not allow it either.

English parts of speech are based on Latin and Greek parts of speech. Some English grammar rules were adopted from Latin, for example John Dryden is thought to have created the rule no sentences can end in a preposition because Latin cannot end sentences in prepositions. The rule of no split infinitives was adopted from Latin because Latin has no split infinitives.

Common errors in English grammar

People who speak English, whether as their first language or not, often make some common mistakes. One big mistake is with subject-verb agreement. This means making sure the verb matches the subject in number. For example, saying "The list of items are on the table" is wrong because "list" is singular. The correct way is "The list of items is on the table."

Another common error is misusing apostrophes. Apostrophes show ownership, like in "the student's book," or shorten words, like in "it's" for "it is." But they are not used to make plurals. For example, writing "apple's" to mean more than one apple is incorrect.

There are also mistakes called dangling modifiers. This happens when a describing phrase doesn’t clearly match the word it describes. For example, "Walking down the street, the trees were beautiful" is wrong because trees can’t walk. The right way is "Walking down the street, she noticed the trees were beautiful."

Finally, people often mix up words like "their," "there," and "they're," or "your" and "you're." This is another frequent error in speaking and writing English.