Homograph And Homophone
Homograph One of two or more words of different meaning which are spelled in the same way, regardless of whether they are pronounced the same or differently. For example, bear (an animal) and bear...
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Imperative
In sentences like Come here, Be quite, and Get me a drink, the verb forms come, be and get are called imperatives. Affirmative imperatives have the same form as the infinitive without to. Negative...
Gerund
When -ing forms are used like nouns, they are called gerunds. A gerund can be the subject, object or complement of a verb. Flying (subject) makes me sick. Trespassing (subject) is prohibited. Smoking (subject)...
Full Stop
Full stop The punctuation mark full stop (.) is used to close sentences. A new sentence that follows a full stop has a capital letter. Full stops are also used in writing abbreviations. This...
First Person Pronouns
The person category which denotes the speaker and possibly also some people associated with the speaker. The English first person pronouns are I/me (singular) and we/us (plural). The singular pronoun I/me always means ‘the...
Dash
Dashes (–) are common in informal writing. They can be used in the same way as colons, semi-colons or brackets. There are three things I can never remember – names, faces and I have...
Dangling Participle
A participle which does not have a subject in the sentence is called a dangling participle or hanging participle. For example, in Driving down the road, a deer leapt out in front of me,...
Gender
The use of different grammatical forms to show the difference between masculine, feminine and neuter or between human and non-human. A noun that denotes a male animal is said to be of the masculine...
Finite And Non-finite Verbs
A verb which is limited by the number and person of its subject is called a finite-verb. Consider the examples given below. I sing. Ann sings. They sing. The verb sing changes its form...
Ergative Verb
A verb which can be either transitive or intransitive is called an ergative verb. English has many ergative verbs. Examples are: sink, ring, boil, speak, explode, collapse, dissolve etc. • The explosion sank the...
