Countable and uncountable nouns

Count nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals or quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an indefinite article (a or an). Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.

Mass nouns (or non-count nouns) can't take plural or combine with number words or quantifiers. Examples from English include laughter, cutlery, helium, and furniture. For example, it is not possible to refer to a furniture or three furnitures. This is true even though the pieces of furniture comprising furniture could be counted. Thus the distinction between mass and count nouns should not be made in terms of what sorts of things the nounsrefer to, but rather in terms of how the nouns present these entities.

Collective nouns

Collective nouns are nouns that refer to groups consisting of more than one individual or entity, even when they are inflected for the singular. Examples include committee, herd, and school (of fish). These nouns have slightly different grammatical properties than other nouns. For example, the noun phrases that they head can serve as the subject of a collective predicate, even when they are inflected for the singular.

Concrete nouns and abstract nouns

Concrete nouns refer to physical entities that can be observed by at least one of the senses (for instance, chair, apple, Janet or atom). Abstract nouns, on the other hand, refer to abstract objects; that is, ideas or concepts (such as justice or hatred). While this distinction is sometimes exclusive, some nouns have multiple senses, including both concrete and abstract ones; consider, for example, the noun art, which usually refers to a concept (e.g., Art is an important element of human culture) but which can refer to a specific artwork in certain contexts (e.g., I put my daughter's art up on the fridge).

Noun phrases

A noun phrase is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word (nominal) optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives.

Adjective

An adjective is a name for a word that describes a noun. Nouns are words that name a place, a person, a thing, or an idea. An adjective is a word that gives more information about the noun that goes with it (accompanies). In other words, adjective is the part of speech that modifies a noun or other substantive by limiting, qualifying, or specifying. It is distinguished in English morphologically by one of several suffixes, such as -able, -ous, -er, and -est, or syntactically by position directly preceding a noun or nominal phrase.
Word Order.As a rule, in English, the adjective comes before the noun it describes. Sometimes an adjective is not followed by a noun, but it's still an adjective, because it is still describing the noun though they are not side by side.

Comparative and Superlative.Sometimes there are different forms of the same adjective. If one joke makes a person laugh more than another joke, then that joke is funnier. This is called the comparative form of the adjective. The day that is colder than any other is the coldest day. This is the superlative form of "cold". Some adjectives need additional words when we want to compare them. For instance, one car may be cheaper than another, but the second car may be more reliable. (We use "more reliable", instead of "reliabler".)

The rule is:For short adjectives ending in a consonant like cold, black, fast, one adds the suffix «er» to make a comparison of greater magnitude. The greatest possible comparison is made by adding the suffix est. For long adjectives like intelligent, conscientious, comprehensive, one uses the word more to make a comparison of greater magnitude. To make the greatest possible comparison one uses the word most.

Adjectives and adverbs. One can make adverbs from some adjectives by adding the suffix ly. Example: take the adjective 'beautiful', the adverb is beautifully. One can do it the other way around: take an adverb like 'presumably', the adjective is 'presumable' (assumable). The adjective 'guilty' becomes the adverb 'guiltily' and vice versa.

Many adjectives are derived from other words (especially nouns), and are easy to recognize by their suffixes. Some of the most common adjective suffixes are: -al (as in equal), -ous (as in famous), -ic (as in basic), -y (as in sleepy), -ful (as in beautiful and -less (as in hopeless)."

Verbs

Verbs in the English language are a part of speech and typically describe an action, an event, or a state.

Forms. A regular English verb has only one principal part. This is the bare form, and is shown in dictionaries. For example, the bare form "exist" produces the forms exist, exists (third person singular present), existed (past tense and past participle), existing(present participle). Each of these can be used in a variety of grammatical contexts. Another class of verbs, strong verbs, have three principal parts. This gives a total of five forms (write, writes, wrote, written, writing).

Bare formis used in:

§ present tense for all persons and numbers other than the third person singular.

§ in the to-infinitive, which is one of two verbal nouns: To write is to learn.

§ as the complement of many auxiliary verbs: I really ought to write it.

§ imperative mood: Write these words.

§ subjunctive mood: I demand that he be there.

Third person singular. The third person singular regular verbs in the present tense in English are distinguished by the suffix -s. run → runs.

If the base ends in one of the sibilant sounds, and its spelling does not end in a silent E, the suffix is written -es: catch → catches. If the base ends in a consonant plus y, the y changes to an i and -es is affixed to the end: cry → cries. English preserves a number of preterite-present verbs, such as can and may. These verbs lack a separate form for the third person singular: she can, she may.

Preterite form (second form)

The preterite form is used in all persons and numbers as the finite verb in a clause, typically to talk about the past. It can also be used in a dependent clause to indicate that a present-time situation is hypothetical. In spelling, the regular preterite is formed by adding ed to the bare form (play → played). Irregular verbs have separate preterites and form the list of English irregular verbs.

Past participle. In regular weak verbs, the past participle is always the same as the preterite.

§ The past participle is used with the auxiliary have for the English perfectconstructions: They have written about the slap of tails on water, about the scent of the lodge...

§ With be or get, it forms the passive voice : Trees sometimesget gnaweddown by beavers.

§ It is used as an adjective. For transitive verbs, it is used as a passive: the written word (=the word that has been written). For intransitive verbs, it is used as a perfect: a fallen tree (=a tree that has fallen).

Present participle The present participle is formed by adding the suffix -ing to the base form: go → going.

§ The present participle is used to form a past, present or future tense with progressive or imperfective aspect: He is writing another long book about beavers.

§ adverb: He is writing quickly.

§ adjective: It is a thrilling book.

§ personal pronoun: Her thrilling novel.

Gerund .The English gerund is that form of a verb that acts as a noun but retains its identity as a verb.

The gerund can often be distinguished from the present participle by inserting the words the act of before it: I enjoy [the act of] drinking wine.

Modal constructions

The English modal verbs are would, will, should, shall, may, might, can, could, must, ought, had better, dare, and need, and are used to express probability, insistence or refusal, habitual action, suggestion, conditional action, etc.

For example, will and would can be used with a different meaning to futurity or conditionality: I will not do it! (refusal, i.e. negative insistence); I would not do that (if I were you). (suggestion, or implied conditional action)

Functions.In addition to conveying the content of an action or state, verbs in English can convey tense, aspect, mood and other modality, and voice.

Tense refers to the grammatical expression of the time (past, present, or future) of an action or state.

Modality refers to the attitude of the speaker toward the action or state, and mood is the inflectional expression of modality. These attitudes generally involve degrees of desirability and possibility.

The indicative mood is the usual mood, which indicates a declaration without indicating that it is desired, counterfactual, or a command.

The imperative mood is used for commands, as in the second person construction Go there now in which the implied subject you is omitted and in which the bare form of the verb is used. English sometimes marks the subjunctive mood of desire in dependent clauses by using the base form of the verb rather than an inflected form,

Voice expresses the relation between the verb's subject and the action.

English expresses two voices: active and passive. The active voice conveys that the subject is the one undertaking the action, as in I see her. The passive voice conveys that the action is being received by the subject, and uses a helping verb with the passive participle: I am seen (by her).

4. Old English

Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century.

It is a West Germanic language closely related to Old Frisian. Old English had a grammar similar in many ways to Classical Latin, and was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than modern English in most respects, including its grammar. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular; it could typically be replaced by the dative. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Verbscame in nine main conjugations (seven strong and two weak), each with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs can be conjugated in only two tenses (vs. the six "tenses" – of Latin), and have no synthetic passive voice (although it did still exist in Gothic).

Gender in nouns was grammatical, as opposed to the natural gender that prevails in modern English. That is, the grammatical gender of a given noun did not necessarily correspond to its natural gender, even for nouns referring to people. For example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine.

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion.

Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic (also known as North Sea Germanic) dialects from the 5th century. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmon's Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts (notably Franks Casket) date to the 8th century.

The history of Old English can be subdivided in:

§ Prehistoric Old English (c. 450 to 650); for this period, Old English is mostly a reconstructed language as no literary witnesses survive (with the exception of limited epigraphic evidence).

§ Early Old English (ca. 650 to 900), the period of the oldest manuscript traditions, with authors such as Cædmon, Bede, Cynewulf and Aldhelm.

§ Late Old English (c. 900 to 1066), the final stage of the language leading up to the Norman conquest of England and the subsequent transition to Early Middle English.

The Old English period is followed by Middle English (12th to 15th century), Early Modern English (ca. 1480 to 1650) and finally Modern English (after 1650).

Dialects

Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity just as Modern English is also not monolithic. Within Old English, there were language variations.

Old English has variation along regional lines as well as variation across different times.

The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Northumbrian, spoken north of the river Humber; Mercian, spoken in the midlands; Kentish, spoken in Kent (the southeastern part); and West Saxon, spoken in the southwest. Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were successfully defended were then integrated into Wessex.

After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing; regional dialects continued even after that time to this day.

The bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom. It became necessary to standardize the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the more remote areas of the kingdom. As a result, documents were written in the West Saxon dialect. The Church was affected likewise, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious program to translate religious materials into English.

Because of the centralization of power and the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification. Late West Saxon was still used after the Norman Conquest but Latin and Norman French then became the languages of the nobilityand administration. Modern-day Received Pronunciation is not a direct descendant of the best-attested dialect, Late West Saxon. It is rather a descendant of a Mercian dialect, since that was the dialect of London.

6. History of the English Language

English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. This broad family includes most of the European languages spoken today. The Indo-European family includes several major branches: Latin and the modern Romance languages (French etc.); the Germanic languages (English, German, Swedish etc.); the Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit etc.); the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech etc.); the Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish Gaelic etc.); Greek.

The influence of the original Indo-European language can be seen today, even though no written record of it exists. The word for father, for example, is vater in German, pater in Latin, and pitr in Sanskrit. It is believed that this group began as a common language in the Elbe river region about 3,000 years ago.

Old English (500-1100 AD)

West Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark: the Angles (whose name is the source of the words England and English), Saxons, and Jutes, began to settle in the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. They spoke a mutually intelligible language, similar to modern Frisian - the language of the northeastern region of the Netherlands - that is called Old English. The majority of words in modern English come from foreign, not Old English roots. In fact, only about one sixth of the known Old English words have descendants surviving today. But this is deceptive; Old English is much more important than these statistics would indicate. About half of the most commonly used words in modern English have Old English roots. Words like be, water, and strong, for example, derive from Old English roots.

The Norman Conquest and Middle English (1100-1500) William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman. Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin had been only a minor influence on the English language.

Early Modern English (1500-1800) The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance. The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language. The last major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press. William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the first English dictionary was published in 1604.