Starting with the Basics of American English Grammar

Considering that English is quite an old language (Ye Olde English) and even the rules of American English have changed since colonial times, there are some basic, long-held grammar rules that are currently inflexible. (I say ”currently” because many of these rules may not apply 300 years from today.) During the coming weeks, I’ll cover some basic definitions and rules that American students are taught in school and foreign speakers learn through ESL (English as a Second Language). Some people may find these posts to be too basic, but I believe the reminders will be beneficial. (Not only for others but also for myself!) Let’s review some of the basic elements of sentence structures also known as parts of speech.

1. Noun: A noun is often defined as a person, place, thing, or idea. It can be singular (just one) or plural (more than one). (Nouns also act as subjects in a sentence.) There are two kinds of nouns: proper nouns and common nouns.

1. Proper nouns cover specific names of people, places, or things, e.g., George Washington (person), Philadelphia (place), or Washington Monument (thing).
2. Common nouns are unspecific names of people, places, or things, e.g., president, city, or monument.

2. Verb: A verb describes some type of action or a state of being. (Verbs are often referred to as predicates in a sentence.) Two kinds of verbs exist: action verbs and linking verbs.

1. Action verbs detail the action being carried out, e.g., run, take, and show.
2. Linking verbs describe a state of being, e.g. is, am, and are.

Examples of a noun and verb used together: Jim jumps. Susan listens. Fido howls.

3. Adjective: An adjective can describe (or modify) a subject or a predicate. Adjectives appear before the nouns they modify or after linking verbs.

Examples of a noun adjective: Joe walked a shaggy dog. Samantha put on her leather, red coat.

Examples of a predicate adjective: The soup smells fantastic. Bob is thrilled.

4. Pronoun: A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun. Examples of pronouns are she, him, it, or they. The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage identifies four kinds of pronouns: personal, reflexive, indefinite, and demonstrative.

1. Personal pronouns: These are pronouns used in place of proper nouns. For example: “Bobby had a crush on Michelle” becomes “he had a crush on her.”
2. Reflexive pronouns: These pronouns end with the suffix -self or -selves, such as myself or ourselves.
3. Indefinite pronouns: These pronouns include unspecified amounts of people or things. Examples of indefinite pronouns include all, anyone, many, somebody, everything, or neither.
4. Demonstrative pronouns: These pronouns are this, that, these, and those. They usually take the form of adjectives that modify nouns, for example, Sally wanted those shoes.

5. Adverb: An adverb modifies verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.

1. Adverbs that modify verbs: Adverbs usually answer where, when, how, why, or how often and can moved to a different position within the sentence without changing the meaning.

   Examples: Michelle wrote slowly. Today Jessie will come home.

2. Adverbs that modify adjectives: These adverbs cannot be moved away from the adjectives they are describing.

   Examples: Kelly wrote an oddly funny editorial. Brian is extremely hot.

6. Preposition: A preposition is a word that connects to a noun or pronoun; as a result, the preposition and the noun create a prepositional phrase. Examples of prepositions include over, under, in, above, below, to, or for.

Examples of prepositional phrases: below the bridge, into the coffee shop, toward the beginning.

7. Conjunction: A conjunction is a word that joins (or bridges) words or groups of words.

1. Coordinating conjunctions join words of equal status such as and, but, and or.
2. Subordinating conjunctions join words of unequal status such as although, because, or whenever.

8. Article: An article is really a singled-out adjective that modifies a noun. There are two main kinds of articles: definite and indefinite. The is considered a definite article while a and an are considered indefinite articles.

1. Definite articles modify a specific noun. For example: Hand me the book. (It must be one particular book.)
2. Indefinite articles refer to a non-specific noun: For example: Hand me a book. (It can be any book.)

Now, when you have a sentence like “The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” you can identify the definite articles, adjectives, nouns, verb, and preposition in this pangram.

By the way, the English language is notorious for not always following a rule of thumb. The items above apply to 99 percent of the English language, but there’s always that 1 percent . . .

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Notes:

1. Mark Lester and Larry Beason, The McGraw-Hill handbook of English grammar and usage. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

2. Jane Straus, The blue book of grammar and punctuation, 9th ed. (Mill Valley, CA: Jane Straus, 2006).

3. Anne Stilman, Grammatically correct, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2010.)

4. Paul Lynch, Allen Brizee, Elizabeth Angeli, “Using articles,” Purdue online writing lab, last modified March 3, 2011, accessed on November 16, 2011, http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/.