Traditional Grammar
This part of speech names a person, place, thing, or idea.
What is a noun?
Attaching the suffix "-ize" to nouns like strategy or colony transforms them into this part of speech.
What is a verb?
In English, adding the inflectional suffix "-s" or "-es" is the standard way to make a noun this.
What is plural?
Unlike a phrase, this grammatical unit is defined by containing both a subject and a verb.
What is a clause?
This term describes words that sound identical when spoken but have entirely different spellings and meanings, such as their, there, and they're.
What is a homophone?
This part of speech describes nouns.
What is an adjective?
Adding the suffix "-ness" to adjectives like kind or happy changes them into this part of speech.
What is a noun?
This part of speech has the present perfect progressive tense.
What is a verb?
e.g. has been running
This specific type of clause can stand alone as a complete sentence because it expresses a complete thought.
This term refers to the positive, negative, or neutral emotional baggage and cultural associations that a word carries beyond its literal definition. The "vibe" of a word.
What is connotation?
This part of speech describes verbs.
Attaching the derivational suffix "-ly" to adjectives like quick or beautiful transforms them into this part of speech.
What is an adverb?
e.g. beautifully, quickly
This part of speech has a comparative and superlative form.
What is an adjective?
In the sentence "We went inside because it started to rain," the bolded section represents this type of dependent clause that answers why, when, or how.
What is an adverbial clause?
While synonyms share similar meanings, these words—such as heavy and light, or arrive and depart—express completely opposite meanings.
What are antonyms?
This part of speech usually describes something's position in time and space.
What is a preposition?
Adding the suffix "-er" to a verb like teach or run turns it into a part of speech that represents this type of person or thing performing the action.
What is a noun/agent?
e.g. teacher, runner
The words louder, faster, and smarter all use this specific type of inflectional morpheme to compare two things.
What is a comparative suffix (or -er)?
This type of dependent clause begins with a relative pronoun like who, which, or that and modifies a noun, as seen in "The book that I borrowed was excellent."
What is a relative/adjective clause?
This term describes words that are spelled exactly the same but have different meanings and sometimes different pronunciations, like a "lead" pipe and to "lead" a team.
What is a homonym?
This is the specific term for a verb form ending in "-ing" that acts completely as a noun in a sentence.
What is a gerund?
Adding the derivational suffix "-ify" to adjectives like pure or clear transforms them into this part of speech.
What is a verb?
e.g. purify, clarify
Unlike derivational morphemes, an inflectional morpheme will never change this fundamental grammatical property of a word.
What is part of speech?
In the sentence "Whoever cleans the kitchen gets a reward," the bolded clause fills a structural slot normally held by a single noun, making it this type of clause.
What is a noun clause?
This is the specific term for the strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, completely free of any emotional associations.
What is denotation?