• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
 
Glossary of Grammatical Terms
 A
accent
 1: an articulative effort giving prominence to onesyllableoveradjacent syllables. 2: a mark used in writing or printing toindicate a specific sound value, stress, or pitch, to distinguishwords otherwise identically spelled, or to indicate that anordinarily mutevowelshould be pronounced. People withdifferent accents might use an accent mark to indicate theyaccent a different syllable.
active
 asserting that the person or thing represented by thegrammaticalsubjectperforms the action represented by theverb. In the lastsentence, the subject "person or thing" performs the action "perform", so the sentence is in the activevoice. In the last sentence, the subject "subject" performs theaction "perform", so the sentence is also in the active voice.(Repeat the last sentence
ad infinitum
.)
adjective
 a word that serves as a modifier of anounto denote a qualityof the thing named, to indicate its quantity or extent, or tospecify a thing as distinct from something else. It answers thequestions "which?", "how many?", and "what kind of?", thoughprobably not all three at once.
adverb
 a word serving as a modifier of averb, anadjective, another adverb, apreposition, aphrase, aclause, or asentence, and expressing some relation of manner or quality, place, time,degree, number, cause, opposition, affirmation, or denial. It
 
answers the questions "where?", "when?", or "how?", even if you didn't ask.
apposition
 a grammatical construction in which two typically adjacentnouns referring to the same person or thing stand in the samesyntactical relation to the rest of asentence. For example, in"the rally of the opposition Labor Party", "Labor Party" is inapposition with "opposition".
article
 one of a small set of words or affixes (as a, an, and the) usedwith nouns to limit or give definiteness to the application.English has an indefinite article (a, an) and a definite article(the). Welsh has only a definite article. I'm sure whole articleshave been written about articles.
assimilation
 the process of conforming one sound to another to aid inpronunciation. For example, in the phrase "in Colorado", the"n" in "in" becomes palatalized because of the following "C". Itmay take you a while to assimilate this concept.
C 
case
 an inflectional form of anoun,pronoun, oradjectiveindicating its grammatical relation to other words. Neither English norWelsh has cases for nouns or adjectives. English has cases forpronouns: I/me/my, he/him/his, she/her/her, you/you/your andthey/them/their are the subjective, objective, andpossessive cases, respectively.
clause
 
 
a group of words containing asubjectandpredicateand functioning as a member of a complex or compoundsentence.It is not related to Santa.
collective
 denoting a number of persons or things considered as onegroup or whole. For example, "flock" is a collectivenoun. Nowthat you understand this concept, we can all breathe acollective sigh of relief.
comparative
 the degree of comparison in a language that denotes increasein the quality, quantity, or relation expressed by anadjective oradverb. Some of my definitions may be "silly", butcomparative is "sillier".
complement
 an added word or expression by which apredicateis madecomplete. For example, "president" and "beautiful" arecomplements in "they elected him president" and "he thoughther beautiful". The latter also happens to be a compliment.
compound subject
 asubjectjoined together with aconjunction. "Or" or "and" can  join together the nouns or clauses. The preceding sentence hasa compound subject. Or I suppose a "compound subject" couldbe one of the king's men living in a walled-in enclosure.
conjugate
 to give in prescribed order the various inflectional forms of something. It is used especially of averb, in which case itmeans to give the forms for everyperson,number,mood, and tense. Aprepositioncan also be conjugated in Welsh.
conjunction
 
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...