Internet Grammar of English, The -- Introduction

When you study difficult topics, reading a different explanation can sometimes be very helpful. The Internet Grammar of English (IGE) provides this sort of help. IGE gives you a slightly different explanation of phrase structure rules in English. It also gives you a few exercises to help you practice.

Start with the introduction. Pay special attention to the bottom half of this page:

(1) How the grammar is organized (= the topics and their sequence)

and

(2) The conventions they use (special ways of writing words and what they mean)




We will spend most of our review time looking at major word classes (N, VB, ADJ etc.) and phrases (NP, VP, AdjP etc.).

Think about this: assume that words such as cook, artist and artistic are new words. How do we know if cook is a noun or a verb? How do we know that artist is a noun, but artistic is an adjective? Where do nouns, verbs etc. usually go in a sentence? Which other word classes do Ns, VBs etc. usually form phrases with? Look at the example sentences and phrases in IGE. How would you diagram them (tree structure)?

(from the IGE Table of Contents)