Grammar

Increase your knowledge of English grammar topics and parts of speech in the English language by reading the following:

1. Active Voice

Active voice is the type of speech where the subject of the verb does the action. For example, the sentence “He drank the juice” is an active voice because the subject ‘he’ of the verb ‘drank’ is doing the main action in this sentence.

2. Adjective 

Words that are used for describing a place, person, living or non-living things etc are called adjectives. Words such as red, slow, heavy, bright, happy, two, big are the words which describe the quality, quantity, number or amount of something. These words are referred to as adjectives.

3. Adverb 

The words that describe a verb are referred to as adverbs. Words such as heavily, brightly, slowly are describing an action of the subject. These words are known as adverbs. For example, in the sentence “He is running slowly”, the word ‘slowly’ is describing the action verb ‘running’ which makes the word ‘slowly’ an adverb.

4. Article

Articles are used before nouns or pronouns and are a type of adjective. There are two types of articles- definite and indefinite. The definite article is  ‘the’ and the indefinite articles are ‘a’ and ‘an’. 

5. Auxiliary Verb

A verb that is used with a main verb is referred to as auxiliary verb. For example, the words such as may, can, must, have, do are the verbs used before an action to complete a meaning. In the sentence, “She can run a 1000 Kilometres” the word ‘she’ is an auxiliary verb as it is supporting the main verb ‘run’.

6. Clause

A group of words that contain a subject and its verb is called a clause. For example, “they were busy when we arrived”, this is a clause as both the subject and its verb are present. 

7. Conjunction

Conjunctions are the words that connect the words of a sentence together. These words also link the group of words in a phrase or clause. The examples of conjunctions are ‘and, ‘but’, ‘if’.

8. Modal Verb

An auxiliary verb that modifies the meaning of the main verb is known as modal verb. The use of an auxiliary verb to express a possibility or probability of the main verb is referred to as a modal verb. It is called ‘modal auxiliary verb’.

9. Noun

Noun refers to the name of an object, concept, person or place. There are many types of nouns. A ‘concrete noun’ refers to something you can see or touch like a fruit or person. An ‘abstract noun’ is something that can only be felt or understood in concept, for example ‘happiness’ is an abstract noun. A ‘countable noun’ is something that you count for example, books, dollars and an ‘uncountable noun’ is the object that you cannot count such as water or music.

10. Passive voice 

Passive voice is a type of speech where the subject receives the action of the main verb. For example, in the sentence “the fish was caught”, the subject ‘fish’ is receiving the action which is being caught. This will be referred to as passive voice.

11. Phrase 

A group of words which do not contain a subject and its verb is called a phrase. For example, “the cat on a table” and “ one orange in basket” are a group of words that do not have a subject and its verb together. This will be referred to as a phrase.

12. Preposition 

Prepositions majorly come before a noun and provide information about the time, direction and place. Prepositions are used to describe the position of a noun or an object in context to place or time. The examples are- in,at,to,under,over etc.

13. Pronoun 

Words that replace nouns in sentences or paragraphs are called pronouns. The examples are I, me, you, him, he, her, she etc. The use of pronoun is showed in the following example- 

Sentence 1: “Eren is fighting for freedom and Eren believes in equality.”

Sentence 2: “Eren is fighting for freedom and he believes in equality.”

In sentence 2, the word ‘he’ has replaced the noun ‘Eren’. The word ‘he’ will be referred to as a pronoun. 

14. Verb 

A word that describes an action or a state of being is known as a verb. The action words such as ‘work’, ‘eat’, ‘run’ , ‘meditate’ and ‘sleep’ are examples of verbs. In the sentence- “ A cat is eating a broccoli”, the word ‘eating’ will be considered a verb as it is describing the action taking place between the subject and object.

Grammar Topics: Sentence 

A sentence is a set of words that is complete and meaningful, it contains a subject and its verb along with a message conveyed in statement, question, command or exclamation form. The sentence construction and the agreement between its parts is the most crucial step to increase proficiency in language. Learn about the types of sentences and its structure by reading the below mentioned points.

Types of Sentences

There are four types of sentences:

• Declarative- the sentence that makes a statement and informs about something, for example- “Levi likes ice cream”.

• Interrogative - this type of sentence asks a question, for example- “Does Anya like eating pie?”

• Imperative- imperative sentence is a command, it tells to do something, for example- “shut the door”.

• Exclamative- the sentence that has an expression of surprise in it, for example- “such a hilarious story!”

Types of Sentence Structure

There are four types of sentence structure:

• Simple- a sentence that is an independent clause with no dependent clause or conjunction.

• Compound- a sentence that has two or more independent clauses joined by a conjunction.

• Complex- a sentence that contains one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. The clauses are joined by a subordinate conjunction such as ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘since’, ‘while’.

• Compound-complex- a sentence that contains multiple independent clauses and at least one dependent clause. These sentences also have conjunctions and subordinators.

Reported Speech

Reported speech or indirect speech tells you what someone said but does not tell the actual words said by the person. For example- “ He said that he didn’t like the jacket” and “students complained about the teacher” are sentences of reported speech.

Direct Speech

Direct speech is the word-to-word repetition of the speaker’s or writer’s message. It is a type of sentence that informs what the other person said in the exact same way the speaker enunciated. There is no addition of words in the main dialogue. For example- he said, “I didn’t like the jacket” is a form of direct speech.

English Grammar Tenses

Tenses are the grammatical constructions of a sentence that indicates the details of occurred events. Tenses are a crucial element of sentence construction as tenses are the basis or subject-verb agreement that takes place in the sentence. The list of English grammar tenses is listed below for your knowledge.

1. Simple present tense

2. Present continuous tense

3. Present perfect tense

4. Present perfect continuous tense

5. Simple past tense

6. Past continuous tense

7. Past perfect tense 

8. Past perfect continuous tense

9. Simple future tense

10. Future continuous tense

11. Future perfect tense

12. Future perfect continuous tense

Conclusion

Grammar can be made easy with simple explanations and plenty of practice. You can learn about the various English grammar topics and increase your grammar vocabulary by reading the discussion provided here. Vedantu makes it easier for students to learn English grammar by  proper categorisation of topics and an easy to  learn approach to assist students in enhancing their grammar skills.