Posts Tagged ‘english grammar’

Learn how to use Question Tags

November 3rd, 2009 admin

question tagQues­tion tag is one sim­ple thing that trou­bles many non-native Eng­lish speak­ers in using them. They are very easy to under­stand but they are tough to use in reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tions because, they are often mixed up with assertive sen­tences. As you all know, there are four kind of sen­tences in Eng­lish, viz., Assertive, Inter­rog­a­tive, Imper­a­tive and Exclam­a­tory. All the sen­tences that we speak fall into one of the above cat­e­gories. Assertive sen­tences are gen­eral state­ments or the state­ments that are made in casual talk or writ­ing. Inter­rog­a­tive sen­tences are used for ask­ing questions.


What is a ques­tion tag?

These are used you want to get answer as either ‘yes’ or ‘no’

Sim­ple Eng­lish sen­tences formed by club­bing assertive and inter­rog­a­tive sentence.

The verb and pro­noun used in the ques­tion tag should be in agreed form with the sub­ject and verb used in assertive sentence.

The struc­ture of ques­tion tag is aux­il­iary verb (do, have, are, can etc) + pro­noun (I, you, he etc) and ques­tion mark symbol.

E.g. Ravi is going to park today, isn’t he?

learn english - Question tags

Learn Eng­lish Lan­guage — Ques­tion Tags

The same sen­tence can also be framed as ‘Ravi is going to park today, isn’t he going to park?’

Only the last part ‘isn’t he?’ is known as ques­tion tag.

The ques­tion tag should be in neg­a­tive form of the sen­tence, if the sen­tence is in pos­i­tive form then ques­tion tag will be in neg­a­tive form and vice versa.

Some Exam­ples:

  1. It is rain­ing out­side, isn’t it? (Neg­a­tive ques­tion tag)
  2. You haven’t taken your break­fast, have you? (Pos­i­tive ques­tion tag)
  3. Joseph and Candy are get­ting mar­ried next Mon­day, are they ?

Note: I + am is a spe­cial case, its ques­tion tag is ‘are you’
E.g. I am watch­ing movie, aren’t you?

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Persons in English grammar

September 21st, 2009 admin

For the proper usage of Eng­lish gram­mar we need the knowl­edge of dif­fer­ent kinds of per­sons. These per­sons are use­ful in deter­min­ing who is speak­ing, being spo­ken to or being spo­ken. There are three dif­fer­ent kinds of per­sons and they are first, sec­ond and third per­sons. Let us know more about dif­fer­ent kinds of per­sons and how these are used.

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Per­sonal Pronouns:

Per­sonal pro­nouns are a kind of pro­nouns which are used to spec­ify a per­son, place, object or a thing.

A per­son in Eng­lish lan­guage deter­mines whether is speak­ing, or being spo­ken to, or being spo­ken about in a sen­tence. This is sim­ply what a ‘per­son’ is. The clas­si­fi­ca­tion of per­sons enables for the bet­ter ways of pre­sen­ta­tion for the speaker and nar­ra­tion for the author.

The per­sonal pro­nouns can be clas­si­fied as under 3 categories.

Sin­gu­lar Plural
First Per­son I, me, mine, my we, us, our, ours
Sec­ond Person you, your, yours you, your, yours
Third Per­son he, him, his, she, her, hers, it they, them, their, theirs, its

In Eng­lish, we have 3 persons.

  • The First per­son, who speaks the statement
  • Sec­ond per­son, to the state­ment is being spo­ken to.
  • Third per­son, about whom the state­ment is being spoken.

Exam­ples:

First per­son: I run 1 mile every­day in the morning.

My roomy has been sick for a week

Here, the per­son is speak­ing some­thing. Hence, it is a first per­son. Pro­nouns such as I, we, me, us, my, mine, our, and ours are in the first person.

Sec­ond per­son: Your cre­ation is so amusing.

You seem so depressed today.

Here, the sen­tence is being said to the per­son. Thus, it is in sec­ond per­son. The pro­nouns in a sec­ond per­son are namely you, your, yours.

Note: It is not always a rule that the pres­ence of a respec­tive pro­noun in the sen­tence deter­mined the per­son of the sen­tence. This rule is invalid mostly in inter­rog­a­tive sentences.

Why did you cheat me?

Though this sen­tence seems to be in first per­son, but is actu­ally in sec­ond sen­tence. Because, the per­son in the sen­tence here is actu­ally being asked. It is like the ques­tion is reflected on the very per­son itself.

Third per­son: The boy is so fond of chocolates.

His genius is incredible.

Here, the first two per­sons talk about the third per­son, who is com­pletely not related to the dis­cus­sion. Hence, it is in third per­son. A sen­tence in the third per­son con­tains pro­nouns namely he, him, his, she, her, hers, it they, them, their, theirs, its.

The impor­tant appli­ca­tion of the per­sons is in find­ing whether the verb is to be used sin­gu­lar or plural in a sen­tence. The table below exactly helps in iden­ti­fy­ing that.

First and Sec­ond person Sin­gu­lar Third  person Plural first Sec­ond, Third

Per­son
(I, you) start (he, she, it) starts (we, you, they) start
(I, you) go (he, she, it) goes (we, you, they) go
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What is Voice?

September 19th, 2009 admin

In Eng­lish gram­mar voice plays an impor­tant role. Voice helps us to describe the rela­tion­ship between an action or a state which is expressed by a verb and other parts of the sen­tence like sub­ject, object etc. So let us learn about basics of voice.

Before going into the actual dis­cus­sion, let’s first define two forms of verbs.

Action Verbs:

Action verbs tell what the sub­ject does in a sen­tence. The action can be either observed by the senses or men­tally felt.

Exam­ple: drive, run, enjoy (observed by the senses)

Study, think (men­tally felt)

Link­ing verbs:

They are sim­ply used to join the sub­ject and the pred­i­cate. Remem­ber that pred­i­cate is the part of a sen­tence con­tain­ing a verb and stat­ing some­thing about the subject.

The most com­mon link­ing verbs include: is, be, look, grow, seem, smell, remain, appear, sound, stay, look, taste, turn and become.

He is a good student.

In the above sen­tence, he is the sub­ject and ‘a good stu­dent’ is a pred­i­cate. These two are con­nected by a link­ing verb ‘is’.

Defin­ing voice:

Along with relat­ing to time through tense, action verbs in a sen­tence, also show whether the sub­ject per­forms the action or receives the action, known as the verb’s voice. Accord­ingly, the sen­tence is declared to be either in active voice or pas­sive voice respec­tively. Note here that the link­ing verbs do not show voice.

1. A verb is active when the sub­ject per­forms the action.

I took the boy to school. (‘I’, the sub­ject is doing the action)

2. A verb is pas­sive when its action is per­formed upon the subject.

The boy is taken to school. (‘The boy’ is a sub­ject. Action is done upon him).

books1

Although the usage seems sim­i­lar, there is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in terms of context-sensitivity. Active voice is used in the cases of more direct and force­ful. By force­ful, it means that it refers much to the sub­ject. But pas­sive voice is used in cases where the sub­ject is given less ref­er­ence (or even omitted).

The usage of pas­sive voice is prefer­able under two conditions:

  • When one doesn’t want to assign blame on the subject.

The project has been in vain.

  • The sub­ject of the action is not exactly known.

A prank SMS arrived at 3:00 A.M.

It is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered a rule not too much use of the pas­sive voice. Stu­dents are rec­om­mended not to frame sen­tences in pas­sive voice in their aca­d­e­mic write-ups.

The pas­sive voice is a kind of polite expres­sion .We encounter sit­u­a­tions where the usage of pas­sive voice is appro­pri­ate and even essen­tial. The Con­text decides in most cases what appro­pri­ate voice to be used.

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English — A Window on the Wall

April 17th, 2009 admin

No one can be blind enough not to see the trend at which the Eng­lish lan­guage is rapidly tak­ing. I am even more afraid that there might not be room for non-English speak­ers. Tech­nol­ogy is mov­ing so first that one need to update him­self hour after an hour to be cur­rent in the field pur­sued. Most devel­op­ing coun­tries take Eng­lish as a native lan­guage that can be accessed by most world coun­tries there­fore they pre­fer post­ing data in Eng­lish lan­guage to reach as many peo­ple as possible.

Most com­mu­ni­ca­tion across the world is done using Eng­lish lan­guage. Com­put­ers win­dow is nor­mally con­fig­ured in Eng­lish and you can’t avoid this unless you trans­late it to a dif­fer­ent lan­guage. It is assumed that almost 3/4 of the world pop­u­la­tion speak Eng­lish with the west­ern world tak­ing a lead.

English - A Window on the Wall

Eng­lish — A Win­dow on the Wall

You want to receive cur­rent infor­ma­tion and be updated on the cur­rent issue through the inter­net. There are very pow­er­ful software’s that once installed will enable you receive cur­rent updates. Eng­lish lan­guage is so hand­ful in infor­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion as it plays a big­ger role to ensure both par­ties com­mu­ni­cate effectively.

With the cur­rent trend, there is dire need for one to learn Eng­lish. You have to be able to write it well and more so have good com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills. The good news with this is that you can eas­ily learn Eng­lish online using your com­puter at home. It is even more advan­ta­geous to know Eng­lish when in a busi­ness envi­ron­ment. You can eas­ily com­mu­ni­cate when online and make trans­ac­tions with­out strains.

Still under­stand that your clients will always place orders with­out con­sid­er­ing your lan­guage sta­tus. Most orders received online are always at Eng­lish default. And you can’t run away from it, the only solu­tion is to learn Eng­lish and cor­rectly affect it.

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