English grammar


English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.

Overview

This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English – forms of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of registers, from formal then to informal. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some historical, social, cultural, and regional varieties of English, although these are minor compared to the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary.
Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class. For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive or English possessive".

Word classes and phrases

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open classes – word classes that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante. The rest are closed classes; for example, it is rare for a new pronoun to enter the language. Determiners, traditionally classified along with adjectives, have not always been regarded as a separate part of speech. Interjections are another word class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language.
Linguists generally accept nine English word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and exclamations. English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to, but some inflectional endings and derivational suffixes are distinct to each class. On the other hand, most words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun. Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, and running. Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized.
Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase. Similarly, adjectival phrases and adverbial phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs, but with other types of phrases, the terminology has different implications. For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition and its complement ; and a determiner phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner.

Nouns

Many common suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age, -hood, and so on, though many nouns are base forms containing no such suffix. Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading.
Nouns are sometimes classified semantically as proper and common nouns or as concrete and abstract nouns. A grammatical distinction is often made between count nouns such as clock and city, and non-count nouns such as milk and decor. Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as "wine" in This is a good wine.
Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. In most cases the plural is formed from the singular by adding -s, although there are also irregular forms, including cases where the two forms are identical. For more details see English plural. Certain nouns can be used with plural verbs even though they are singular in form, as in The government were.... This is a form of synesis, and is more common in British than American English. See.
English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms, through the addition of -'s or just an apostrophe in the case of -s plurals and sometimes other words ending with -s. More generally the ending can be applied to noun phrases ; see below. The possessive form can be used either as a determiner or as a noun phrase.
The classification of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate. It differs from the noun inflection of languages such as German, in that the genitive ending may attach to the last word of the phrase. To account for this, the possessive can be analysed, for instance as a clitic construction or as an inflection of the last word of a phrase.

Phrases

s are phrases that function grammatically as nouns within sentences, for example as the subject or object of a verb. Most noun phrases have a noun as their head.
An English noun phrase typically takes the following form :
In this structure:
  • the predeterminer is an element used at the beginning of a noun phrase e.g. all in all this time or half in half the size.
  • the determiner may be an article or other equivalent word, as described in the following section. In many contexts, it is required for a noun phrase to include some determiner.
  • pre-modifiers include adjectives and some adjective phrases, and noun adjuncts. Adjectival modifiers usually come before noun adjuncts.
  • a complement or postmodifier may be a prepositional phrase, a relative clause, certain adjective or participial phrases, or a dependent clause or infinitive phrase appropriate to the noun.
An example of a noun phrase that includes all of the above-mentioned elements is that rather attractive young college student to whom you were talking. Here that is the determiner, rather attractive and young are adjectival pre-modifiers, college is a noun adjunct, student is the noun serving as the head of the phrase, and to whom you were talking is a post-modifier. Notice the order of the pre-modifiers; the determiner that must come first and the noun adjunct college must come after the adjectival modifiers.
Coordinators such as and, or, and but can be used at various levels in noun phrases, as in John, Paul, and Mary; the matching green coat and hat; a dangerous but exciting ride; a person sitting down or standing up. See below for more explanation.
Noun phrases can also be placed in apposition, as in that president, Abraham Lincoln,.... In some contexts, the same can be expressed by a prepositional phrase, as in the twin curses of famine and pestilence.
Particular forms of noun phrases include:
  • phrases formed by the determiner the with an adjective, as in the homeless, the English ;
  • phrases with a pronoun rather than a noun as the head ;
  • phrases consisting just of a possessive;
  • infinitive and gerund phrases, in certain positions;
  • certain clauses, such as that clauses and content clauses like what he said, in certain positions.

    Gender

A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Modern English retains features relating to natural gender, most prominently the use of pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other genders and certain others for sexless objects – although feminine pronouns are sometimes used when referring to ships and nation-states.
Some aspects of gender usage in English have been influenced by the movement towards a preference for gender-neutral language. Animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. While the vast majority of nouns in English do not carry gender, there remain some gendered nouns and derivational affixes that denote gender.
MasculineFeminineGender neutral
manwomanadult
boygirlchild
husbandwifespouse
actoractressperformer
roosterhenchicken

Many nouns that mention people's roles and jobs can refer to either a masculine or a feminine subject, for instance "cousin", "teenager", "teacher", "doctor", "student", "friend", and "colleague".
  • Jane is my friend. She is a dentist.
  • Paul is my cousin. He is a dentist.
Often the gender distinction for these neutral nouns is established by inserting the word "male" or "female".
  • Sam is a male nurse.
  • No, he is not my boyfriend; he is just a male friend.
  • I have three female cousins and two male cousins.
Rarely, nouns illustrating things with no gender are referred to with a gendered pronoun to convey familiarity. It is also standard to use the gender-neutral pronoun.
  • I love my car. She is my greatest passion.
  • France is popular with her neighbors at the moment.
  • I traveled from England to New York on the Queen Elizabeth; she is a great ship.

    Determiners

English determiners constitute a relatively small class of words. They include the articles the and a; certain demonstrative and interrogative words such as this, that, and which; possessives such as my and whose ; various quantifying words like, some, many, various; and numerals. There are also many phrases that can play the role of determiners.
Determiners are used in the formation of noun phrases. Many words that serve as determiners can also be used as pronouns.
Some sources, e.g. Cambridge Dictionary, Longman Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, and Collins COBUILD English grammar distinguish between predeterminers and determiners. Following this distinction, determiners can't be used directly next to each other. However, it is possible to put a predeterminer before a determiner.
In many contexts, it is required for a noun phrase to be completed with an article or some other determiner. It is not grammatical to say just cat sat on table; one must say my cat sat on the table. The most common situations in which a complete noun phrase can be formed without a determiner are when it refers generally to a whole class or concept and when it is a name. This is discussed in more detail at English articles and Zero article in English.