Understanding English Grammar

Contents

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pp. v-

Preface

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pp. vii-ix

Understanding English Grammar is a popular title and there are already a number of books in the market by that name. So what makes this book any different from the others? Part of the difference is reflected by its subtitle: A Course Book for Chinese Learners of English. Virtually all other books on English grammar...

Introduction

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pp. 1-5

This book is about English grammar. We hope that, at the end of it, you will get a better understanding of how English grammar works, and that your own ability to use it will also be improved. But first, what do we mean by...

1. The Subject

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pp. 7-19

Let’s consider these two sentences: 1. Singapore is the smallest republic in the world. 2. The smallest republic in the world is Singapore...

2. Nouns and Noun Phrases

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pp. 21-40

You all know what nouns are. Here are some common nouns in English: water, air, earth, rice, sand, gold, paper, money, time, advice, courage. As you learned in school long ago, nouns are names of ‘things’...

3. Tense and Finiteness

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pp. 41-55

If you look at a typical piece of writing by an average student, you are bound to notice a lot of errors which have to do with the forms of verbs. Why is it so difficult to learn to use verbs correctly in English...

4. Auxiliary Verbs and Aspect

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pp. 57-71

In Unit 3, you saw that a verb in English is not always used alone, but often together with one or more auxiliary verbs (or ‘auxiliaries’ for short) to form a verb group. In this unit, we’ll explore the most important grammatical functions that are associated with the use of auxiliaries...

5. Transitivity and Passive Voice

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pp. 73-90

In this unit, we’ll look at another important property of verbs, which seems to show some similarities between English and Chinese — and yet they are very different in some other ways...

6. Verb Complementation

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pp. 91-103

Learning the grammar of a language (to put it simply) is mainly learning about what kinds of words or phrases go with what other kinds of words or phrases to form sentences. For example, what kinds of words would go with a noun? From what you have seen so far, they would include...

7. Simple Sentences

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pp. 105-116

As you know, the chief aim of learning grammar is to be able to put words together to form ‘grammatical’ sentences. (It is of course no less important to be able to write not only isolated sentences but whole texts — but for the purposes of this course, we’ll start at the more basic level of sentences...

8. Finite Subordinate Clauses

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pp. 117-129

There are two important things that you need to know about how to put sentences together grammatically in English...

9. Non-finite Subordinate Clauses

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pp. 131-142

In Unit 8, we learned that clauses can be divided into two types: main clauses and subordinate clauses. Main clauses must be finite (i.e. have a finite verb, which is marked for tense). We also studied the forms and functions of some finite subordinate clauses..

10. Relative Clauses

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pp. 143-158

In Units 8 and 9, we saw that a subordinate clause (both finite and non-finite) functions as part of another clause, by being its subject, object, complement or adverbial. For example, in sentence 1, the underlined subordinate clause (‘what you said’) is the object of the sentence...

Notes and Answer Key

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pp. 159-219

Appendices

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pp. 221-232

Bibliography

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pp. 233-234