What is the popular definition of nouns?
It describes a person, place or thing.
What are modal verbs?
Modal verbs belong to the category: auxiliary verbs. We don't use them on their own, we have to use them in conjunction with another (main) verb.
What do verbs do?
Verbs describe actions and express other meanings such as existence, mental conditions, processes and relationships.
What do adjectives do?
Adjectives are often called "describing words". They provide information about the qualities of something described in a noun, a noun phrase or noun clause.
What do prepositions look like?
A preposition is a word or group of words used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, time, place, location, spatial relationships, or to introduce an object
What does it mean that a noun is countable?
That we are able to count what the noun describes
What do modal verbs do?
We use them to make an assessment, judgement or interpretation of what we are speaking or writing about, or to express our attitude to this.
What are main verbs?
Verbs that don't need to be accompanied by other verbs, and verbs that convey the key meaning in a group of verbs.
A lot of adjectives are closely related to nouns or verbs. Give an example of this.
Beautiful (adjective) - beauty (noun)
Drinkable (adjective) - drink (verb) etc.
Where do prepositions come in sentences?
They usually occur before a noun or - ing form, immediately after a verb or at the beginning of a phrase including a noun.
Which type of nouns are usually countable?
Nouns which describe seperate and seperable objects (books, computers etc.)
Give an example of a pure modal verb
Can, could, may, might, must, shall, should and would.
What are the three main verbs tenses?
Present tense, past tense and future.
Where do adjectives come in sentences?
There are two usual sentence positions for single adjectives:
- before a noun (within a noun phrase)
- after an noun (or pronoun) and a verb
What are dependent prepositions?
After many adjectives, nouns and verbs, we need to use a particular preposition.
Example:Afraid "of", crazy "about" etc.
Where do nouns come in sentences?
Nouns can:
- act as the subject of a verb
- act as the object of the verb
- act as the complement of a verb
Modal verbs have more than one meaning or function, and it is usually only the context which makes clear which of these is intended.
What are event and state verbs? Give an example.
Event verbs are verbs that describe an action, something we consciously do. Examples: break, eat etc.
State verbs are verbs that describe a state or condition. Examples: belong, know etc.
The order of the adjectives:
- general before specific
- opinion before description
Some words can function both as prepositions and adverbs. Give an example of these.
Adverbs: They passed it "along".
Prepositions: He ran "past" the house.
Adverbs: He ran past.
What does it mean when a noun can countable as well as uncountable?
Some nouns are countable with one meaning, and uncountable with a different meaning
Where do modal verbs come in sentences?
Modal verbs come immediately before the main verb in affirmative and negative statements. In questions, modal verbs come before the subject.
Where do verbs come in sentences?
It depends, because the type of verb we choose and the type of sentence we use it in affect the order of sentence constituents. But we can often generalise that most of the time the verb follows the subject and precedes everything else.
What do we do in the comparative and superlative forms? Give an example of a comparative and a superlative form.
We add -er to the end of the short adjectives to make the comparative form. Example: older.
We add -est to make the superlative form. Example: coldest.
In - into
Above - over
Towards - against
Between - among
etc.