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Grammar Quiz 12
Assessment over chapter 12: Words and Word classes
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Lexicon | The store of words--the internalized dictionary--that every speaker of a language has. |
| Lexical feature | A characteristic of a word that serves to distinguish it from similar words; for example, only countable nouns can be signaled by the indefinite article or by numbers. |
| Countable nouns | A noun whose referent can be identified as a separate entity. This noun can be signaled by the indefinite article, "a" or "an," and by numbers: a house; an experience; two eggs. Has singular and plural form. |
| Noncountable nouns | A noun referring to what might be called undifferentiated mass--such as wood, water, sugar, glass--or an abstraction--justice, love, indifference. |
| Mass noun | A noun that cannot be counted; same definition as noncountable noun. |
| Abstract noun | A noun that refers to a quality, such as peace or happiness, rather than a concrete object, such as "cup" or "computer." |
| Open classes | The classes of words that provide the lexical content of the language: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Each has characteristic derivational and inflectional affixes that distinguish its forms. |
| Closed classes | The classes of words that explain the grammatical or structural relationships of the open classes. The major ones are determiners, auxiliaries, qualifiers, prepositions, and conjunctions. |
| Inflection | A suffix that is added to the open classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to change their grammatical role in some way. Nouns have 2 of these suffixes: -s plural and -s' possessive. |
| Nouns | One of the four open classes, whose members fill the headword position in the noun phrase. Most can be inflected for plural and possessive (boy, boys, boy's, boys') |
| Possessive case | The inflected form of nouns (John's the dog's) and pronouns (my, his, your, her, their, etc.), usually indicating possession or ownership. |
| Subject-verb agreement | A third-person singular subject in the present tense takes the -s form of the verb: "The dog barks" all night." A plural takes the base form: "The dogs bark." |
| Collective noun | A noun that refers to a collection of individuals: group, team, family. They may be replaced with either singular or plural pronouns, depending on the meaning. |
| Common noun | A noun with general, rather than unique, reference (in contrast to proper nouns.) They may be countable (house, book) or noncountable (water, oil); they may be concrete (house, water) or abstract (justice, indifference.) |
| Proper noun | A noun with individual reference to a person, building, holiday, historical event, work of art or literature, or geographic region or location, and other such names. These nouns are capitalized. |
| Verbs | One of the four open classes, traditionally thought of as the action word in the sentence. Each one, without exception, has an s and an -ing form and also has a past-tense and past-participle form. |
| Adjectives | One of the four open classes, whose members act as modifiers of nouns; most can be inflected for comparative and superlative degree (big, bigger, biggest); they can be qualified or intensified (rather big, very big); and have derivational affixes |
| Comparative degree | Variations in adjectives and some adverbs that indicate a noun's comparison to another (Sirius is "brighter" than Canopus.) |
| Superlative degree | Variations in adjectives and some adverbs that indicate a noun's comparison to two or more (After the sun, Sirius is the "brightest" star seen from Earth.) Compares 3 or more items to indicate that one possesses a quality to the highest or least degree. |
| Degree | Variations in adjectives and some adverbs that indicate the simple quality of a noun, or positive degree, its comparison to another, comparative degree; or its comparison to two or more, the superlative degree. |
| Adverbs | One of the four open classes, whose members act as modifiers of verbs, contributing information of time, place, manner, reason, and the like. |
| Adverbs of manner | An adverb that refers to how or in what manner an action is carried out. Most of these adverbs are derived from adjectives with the addition of --ly: "quickly, merrily, candidly." |
| Flat adverbs | An adverb that is the same in form as its corresponding adjective: fast, high, early, late, hard, long, etc. |
| Derivational affix | A suffix or prefix that is added to an open-class word, either to change its class (fame--famous) or to change its meaning (legal--illegal; boy--boyhood). |
| Indefinite article | The determiner "a" or "an," which marks an unspecified countable noun. |
| Definite article | The determiner "the," which generally marks a specific or previously mentioned noun: "the" man at "the" airport; "the" point I made previously. |
| Auxiliary verbs | One of the closed-class words, a marker of verbs. These include forms of "have" and "be," as well as the modals, such as will, shall, and must. |
| Modal auxiliary | The auxiliaries may/might, can/could, will/would, shall/should, and must. These add nuances of meaning to the main verb, referring to probability, possibility, obligation, and so on. |
| Semi-auxiliary | A multi-word verb phrase that functions like a helping verb (auxiliary verb) but has some differences, such as changing with tense and person: ex: have to, ought to, used to, be able to. |
| Qualifier | A closed-class word that qualifies or intensifies an adjective or adverb: We worked "rather" slowly. We worked "very" hard. Can add specificity or precision, influencing the degree of certainty or intensity of a statement. |
| Absolute | An adjective with a meaning that is generally not capable of being intensified or compared (unique, perfect, square), or a phrase (subject-predicate construction) without a tense-carrying verb. |
| Preposition | A closed-class word found preceding a nominal. They can be categorized according to their form as single-word (above, at, in, with, of, etc.) or phrasal (according to, along with, instead of, etc.) |
| Prepositional phrase | The combination of a preposition and its object. In form, the object of the preposition is usually a noun phrase (After "class," he worked at a clinic.) |
| Particles | Words such as "in" and "out" that join verbs to create phrasal verbs. |
| Phrasal verbs | A verb combined with a particle (a preposition-like word); the combination produces a unique meaning, often idiomatic: "bright about, come across, make up." |
| Coordinating conjunction | A conjunction that connects two or more sentences or structures within a sentence: and, but, or, nor, for, yet. |
| Subordinating conjunction | A conjunction that introduces a dependent clause and expresses the relationship of the clause to the main clause. Among the most common are "after, although, as, as long as, as soon as, because, before, even though, if, provided that, since, so that." |
| In most adjectives or two or more syllables, the comparative and superlative degrees are marked by... | "More" and "most," respectively. |
Created by:
FaithMcBaith
Popular English Verbs sets