This book is about English grammar. We hope that, at the end of it, you will get a better understanding of how English grammar works, and that your own ability to use it will also be improved. But first, what do we mean by ‘grammar’?

We all know what words are. Here are a number of words from English:

met

she

yesterday

her friend

On their own, one at a time, words tell us very little. But here is the most powerful feature of all human languages — we can combine words to make sentences, which can tell us a lot...

Let’s consider these two sentences:

1. Singapore is the smallest republic in the world.

2. The smallest republic in the world is Singapore.

The two sentences (1–2) are made up of exactly the same words, and they seem to be saying the same thing. But what is the subject of each of these sentences?

To put it simply, the subject is what the rest of the sentence is about. So, sentence 1 is about ‘Singapore’, and sentence 2 is about ‘the smallest republic in the world’. The subject is one of the most important parts of a sentence in...

You all know what nouns are. Here are some common nouns in English:

water, air, earth, rice, sand, gold, paper, money, time, advice, courage

As you learned in school long ago, nouns are names of ‘things’ — some we can touch, and some we can’t. We can talk about any of them:

1. Water is hard to find in a desert.

2. Rice grows well in a hot, humid climate.

3. Courage is an admirable quality.

Notice that all the nouns in italics in the above examples can be used on their own in a sentence (without an article, etc.) — just...

If you look at a typical piece of writing by an average student, you are bound to notice a lot of errors which have to do with the forms of verbs. Why is it so difficult to learn to use verbs correctly in English?

Let’s start by looking at Chinese. Take any verb — say, the verb chi (吃 ‘eat’).

How many different forms does the Chinese verb chi(吃) have?

In Chinese, a verb has only one form. Chi is always chi — no matter who, no matter when, no matter how. Now take the English verb eat.

Can you list...

In Unit 3, you saw that a verb in English is not always used alone, but often together with one or more auxiliary verbs (or ‘auxiliaries’ for short) to form a verb group. In this unit, we’ll explore the most important grammatical functions that are associated with the use of auxiliaries.

There are two broad types of auxiliaries in English: primary auxiliaries and modal auxiliaries. We will focus on the primary auxiliaries here, as they are much harder to learn, and are much more different from Chinese, than the modal auxiliaries. The primary auxiliaries in English are be, have, and...

In this unit, we’ll look at another important property of verbs, which seems to show some similarities between English and Chinese — and yet they are very different in some other ways.

Here are some common verbs in English, each used in a sentence in a typical way. Based on how they are used here, can you divide them into two groups (let’s call them Groups ‘A’ and ‘B’)? Can you give a reason for your choice?

1. He slept.

2. He built this house.

3. He smiled.

4. He damaged the vase.

5. He died.

6. He scolded the policeman....

Learning the grammar of a language (to put it simply) is mainly learning about what kinds of words or phrases go with what other kinds of words or phrases to form sentences.

For example, what kinds of words would go with a noun? From what you have seen so far, they would include:

Determiners (like a, the, this, that, my, her)

Adjectives (like good, bad, noisy, political)

Prepositional phrases (like on the table, in Hong Kong, at the ceremony)

Relative clauses (like who hates grammar, which I saw yesterday, smiling at me)

We can ‘build up’ a noun phrase with...

As you know, the chief aim of learning grammar is to be able to put words together to form ‘grammatical’ sentences. (It is of course no less important to be able to write not only isolated sentences but whole texts — but for the purposes of this course, we’ll start at the more basic level of sentences.)

So far, we’ve been looking at parts of sentences, such as the noun or noun phrase and the verb or verb group, because they have their own internal structures and it’s important to understand them properly.

The noun (or noun phrase) and the verb...

There are two important things that you need to know about how to put sentences together grammatically in English:

(a) How to put a clause together (this was the point of Unit 7).

(b) How to join two or more clauses together to form longer and more complex sentences.

A main clause (or independent clause) is one which is capable of standing alone as a sentence, and if you can do (a) properly, then you can write simple sentences properly. (But be warned that ‘simple sentences’ may not be all that simple!) In Units 8 and 9, we’ll focus on...

In Unit 8, we learned that clauses can be divided into two types: main clauses and subordinate clauses. Main clauses must be finite (i.e. have a finite verb, which is marked for tense). We also studied the forms and functions of some finite subordinate clauses.

It is important to know that, unlike main clauses, subordinate clauses can be either finite or non-finite. The following examples (taken from Unit 8) show both possibilities. The underlined subordinate clauses in sentences 1, 3, 5, 7 are finite, while those in sentences 2, 4, 6, 8 are non-finite (the non-finite verbs are given in...

In Units 8 and 9, we saw that a subordinate clause (both finite and non-finite) functions as part of another clause, by being its subject, object, complement or adverbial. For example, in sentence 1, the underlined subordinate clause (‘what you said’) is the object of the sentence:

1. I heard what you said.

‘What you said’ is an object just like any other object, e.g. ‘a song’ in:

2. I heard a song.

But there is one other type of clause which is even ‘lower’ than that. It is not even part of a clause (like a subject, object or...