Grammar
“He is sitting in the car.” The sentence makes sense and communicating the message very clearly. What if some one says. “He the car in sitting is.” Here the same words are coined together but the order is changed. This order does not make much sense for the native English speaker and he would call it grammatically incorrect sentence. This is grammar. Grammar guides us how the words should be arranged to make a proper sentence. For instance in Punjabi and Persian Language the sentence has following order
Subject + Object + verb.
But in English the order we have following order
Subject + verb + Object.
Hence it is very important to follow the grammar rules otherwise the words would not communicate as intended by the speaker.
Before studying more examples, let’s revise our high school concepts about grammar. Let’s study parts of speech.
Noun:
Any “thing” is called noun. Here the “thing” can be a person, creature, location or even abstract idea.
Example: earth, hatred, love, school,bird, lion, Aslam.
Noun has two sub-types
1. Common Noun
If the noun is not generic i.e. not referring to some particular object.
Example: boy, lion, school, city. etc.
2. Proper Noun
If noun is referring to some particular object.
Example: Awais, Jumbo (name of lahore zoo lion who died in 2014), Government School township, Gujranwala.
Articles
are used with nouns to classify or identify them.
Example: (a,an,the)
Adjective
Adjective is used to describe some quality of a noun.
Example: Old city. New Student. Good teacher.etc…
Verbs
These are the words describing actions.
Example: eat, go, sleep, stay, dance
Adverbs
usually provide more information about state, actions and events
Example: very, slowly, really, basically etc.
Prepositions
are very short words usually describing location and time information.
Example: at, in, on, near, with, without etc
Pronouns
are the words being used in place of nouns
Example: he, she, it, they, I, you, we etc.
Conjunctions
are used to connect two words, phrases or sentences and also describe relationships between them.
Example: and, when, but, because.
Agreement
All the above discussed parts of speech follow grammatical rules to fit in the sentences. One of them is the rule of “Agreement”. The verb must be in agreement with the subject. This agreement may depend upon the following criteria.
Agreement with person category
The verb must be according to the category of the person i.e. first person, second person and third person.
Example: “She go to school ” is incorrect. Due to singular third person we should use “goes” instead of “go”
Agreement with number category
The verb must be according to subjects number.
Example: the boy goes to school. the boys go to school.
Agreement with tense
The tense should also be chosen accordingly.
Example. second form of verb for past indefinite tense and first form for present indefinite tense.
Agreement with gender
There are two types of gender
Natural Gender
These are for living things. English has different agreements for both.
Example: Sara will do her homework. Aslam will do his homework
Grammatical gender
These gender are not common in English. But it is found in many language. In Punjabi we have gender for every object. While translating from one language to other the gender agreement is also very important. Otherwise very the sentences look very funny. The fun can be seen when some European tries to learn Punjabi.
Example: PaNi (water) is treated as masculine and bottle is treated and feminine.
Constituent analysis
In this analysis, we try to analyze the given sentence with the help of part of speech. it needs to be done quite systematically. The general rule of thumb is as hierarchical ordering as
Sentence into noun phrase and verb phrases.
Noun Phrase and verb phrase into article, noun, verb as in below picture.
Labeled and bracketed sentences
It is another technique to break a sentence into parts of speech in systematic way.
Sentence —> Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase
Noun Phrase –> noun, article, adjectives
Verb Phrase –> verb, noun phrase.
The below diagram (from The study language George Yule) explains it all.
That’s it.