/0's general English Language thread

[/0]

Well I can't believe it myself but I'm doing some English Language studying and already there are so many things I'm unsure about. I made this thread to ask any general EL questions, especially related to technical aspects of EL

Anyway here's some to get the ball rolling

1. How do you classify contractions such as 'it's'? Would they be nouns, verbs, both or neither?
2. Is 'motorway crash' classified as one noun or two nouns? Also, would motorway also be a modifier?
3. In a metaphoric phrase such as "I give my heart to thee", would 'heart' be an abstract or concrete noun?
4. In a phrase like "The gold dog", would 'gold' be an adjective or noun?
5. Do we need to explicitly know about descriptive adjectives, size or distance adjectives, age adjectives, or colour adjectives?

Thankyou

[AppleThief]

1. I think you can just call it a contraction whilst in contracted form. Alternatively, "it" is a noun, and "is" is a primary auxiliary.

e.g. It   is   running
      (n) (a)  (v)

Remember that auxiliaries come before a verb and tell us more about it. Primary auxiliaries include be, have, do, is was, has.

Now, most of the rest of the questions are pretty much more advanced than you have to know for EL (e.g. they don't ask about abstract vs. concrete nouns on the exam). All of the following is just random thoughts from me. They may be correct or incorrect

2. I'm having trouble with this myself...either "motorway" is an adjective describing the type of crash (and thus, a modifier), or "motorway crash" is a noun phrase. I think I'm leaning to the second option.

3. I'd call it abstract. But I think it's better to analyse this clause in terms of the figurative language it uses. You might say there is symbolism involved with the heart representing love (another abstract noun)

4. I'd say an adjective, just as "blue" in "the blue man" is an adjective.

5. Nope. Well, it's never been tested in an exam...

[happypuff]

One word for you. Context. (for questions 2 to 4)
Any specific word is not locked into one part of speech for life. It depends on how it's used.

5 - I have never seen those categories before this post in my life.

[/0]

Thanks for the help. The textbook I'm learning from is 'Mastering Advanced English Language' by Sara Thorne. It's not designed for VCE, in fact it's for the UK education system, but it's on the booklist so meh.

Hmmm... I had thought 'gold' in 'the gold dog' would still be a noun, but a modifying noun.

So... modifiers are anything that adds extra information to the subject, predicate or object right? In that case, would prepositions and determiners also fall under the category of modifier?

I'm also having trouble understanding the difference between a paradox, antithesis and oxymoron :/

Does English Language only focus a bit on grammar etc.? If so then what do you think would be a good way to study EL?

Thanks heaps

[AppleThief]

Nouns can't modify. Can they? Modifiers = adjectives, adverbs (only those). To my knowledge, if something modifies a noun, then it must be an adjective.

The difference between paradox and oxymoron is that paradoxes seems to be a contradiction, but are true/make sense, but oxymorons are totally contradictory.

e.g.
Paradox: "deliciously ugly".
Profound and sounds strange, but does make sense

Oxymoron: "deafening silence"
Contradiction that doesn't make sense. How can silence deafen you?
Oxymorons are generally used for emphatic effect.

That's not a great explanation, but paradox isn't even on the study design...

The way to remember antithesis is to remember that it is a type of parallelism, which is repetition of syntactic (grammatical) structure. The semantic relationship between structures is that of antonymy.

e.g.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.

You know it is antithesis because the structure is the same (starts with verb, etc.)

[/0]

This is from a school exam:

When evening came, the men assembled at the edge of the forest. Uncertainty and doubt behind, each man understood the importance of his personal mission. A mistake would throw every life into danger and at some point their presence would be detected. Each man stood at the brink of a private nightmare. Discovery was inevtiable, however, and the consequences would be deadly for some. MacMahon, a solitary gifure dressed in grey and shadowed by grief, coughed softly. The men lifted their worn faces to their Captain.

Identify:

5 common nouns: (I got 4)

4 adverbs: (I only got 1)

What are the answers? thanks

[jackinthepatch]

Is the question saying that there are only 5 common nouns and 4 adverbs in the whole paragraph? Or are there more, but you only have to identify a few of them?

Because I counted more than 5 nouns lol...that could just be me though lol.

[/0]

I think there might be more, but they have to be common nouns, not just nouns.

[jackinthepatch]

Evening, men, forest, uncertainty, doubt (in this case it's a noun). There's a lot more than that...if my definition of a common noun is correct. From what I was taught, a noun is a thing/object or a concept.

[/0]

I put down uncertainty, danger, discovery, consequences, and grief as abstract nouns and they were correct. As common nouns I put forest, figure, Captain, men, and faces, but Captain was marked incorrect.

What I've heard is that common nouns are nouns that can be touched or that aren't abstract nouns. (With abstract nouns being ideas, concepts etc.)

[jackinthepatch]

Abstract nouns? Lol I don't know about them yet, shows I've got a bit to learn still

[nerd]

Captain is not a common noun, because it is the title (name) of the role that the man has. Look at the capital letter (Captain). This implies that it's a proper noun.

[jackinthepatch]

Ok, I just looked up the difference between common nouns and abstract nouns, I get it now lol. Yay! 

[AppleThief]

Hmmm, I can only find two adverbs: softly, deadly.

I wonder where the others are hiding...

[UprightMan]

When evening came, the men assembled at the edge of the forest. Uncertainty and doubt behind, each man understood the importance of his personal mission. A mistake would throw every life into danger and at some point their presence would be detected. Each man stood at the brink of a private nightmare. Discovery was inevitable, however, and the consequences would be deadly for some. MacMahon, a solitary figure dressed in grey and shadowed by grief, coughed softly. The men lifted their worn faces to their Captain.

Common nouns = concrete nouns...? ;  men, forest, figure, faces, grey.
Adverbs - deadly, softly...and after that I can only find adverbials =s

EDIT:
"The gold dog", "the blue man" and "motorway crash". You could take blue man, gold dog and motorway crash as noun phrases.  Makes things easier to understand in my eyes.