Tag: Susan

Nouns – Common and Proper

  • Look at the following sentences:

 

  1. Jack is boy.
  2. Tom is a boy.
  3. John is a boy.
  4. Dick is a boy.

 

  • The word boy occurs in all the four sentences. It is a common name used for all the boys. But all boys have special names too. Jack, Tom, John and Dick are special names of these four boys.
  • Pets and places also have special names. Cat and dog are common names used for all cats and dogs. But we often give special names to our pets:

       1.   My cat’s name is Silky. 

      2.   I call my dog, Naughty.

  • Jackie, Jimmy, Buddy, Molly, Rover, Rustam, Rosebud, Tiger, Pussy, Snowy, Snowball, Rocky, Jumbo, Appu, are some special names of our pets.
  • Places also have both common and special names. The words village, city, town, country, school, college, hospital, park, street are common names. But India, Australia, Delhi, Aton School, Sony Hospital, White Park are special names of places.
  • Similarly books, newspapers, magazines, days, months, festivals, institutions, companies, products etc. also have special names .The Bible, The Gita, Great Expectations, Harry Potter, The Times, Femina, Sunday, January, Christmas, Diwali, are all special names.
  • These special names are called Proper Nouns and common names are called Common Nouns.
  • Special names or Proper nouns always begin with a capital letter.
  • Some examples:
  1. Susan is a good girl.      
  2.  Peter is a smart boy.
  3. Bombay is a big city.
  4. Jackie is my dog.     
  5. Ganga is a holy river
  6. Femina is a woman’s magazine.

 

Susan, Peter, Bombay, Jackie, Ganga and Femina are Proper Nouns and girl, boy, city, dog, river, woman, magazine are Common Nouns.

 

  • A Proper Noun is the special name of a particular person, place or thing.
  • A Common Noun is a name given in common to all persons or things of the same class or kind.

 

 

 

Basic Sentence Patterns

Basic Sentence Patterns

To learn a language (in our case English), at the preliminary stage, it helps if we know the Basic Sentence Patterns. And if we are able to make Basic Sentences, transformation becomes easy i.e. from Affirmative (Positive) to Negative and Interrogative (Question), Active to Passive or Simple to Compound and Complex (use of more than one finite verbs).

Note – A Finite Verb has a tense and has a subject with which it agrees in number and person; e.g. sleep is finite in the sentence Babies sleep most of the time and looks is finite in the sentence The old man looks ill. But go in the sentence She wants to go is non-finite as it has no variation of tense and does not have a subject.

Most of the English Subject-and-Predicate sentences are built on the following principles. The Sentence has a framework consisting of Subject, Verb and Whatever Completer(s) – Direct Object, Indirect Object, and Complement. They come in a fixed word order. Let’s study them with the help of examples:

  1. Subject + Verb(S + V) – Cats mew.
  2. Subject + Verb + Complement(S + V + C) – Cats are animals.
  3. Subject +Verb + Direct Object(S + V + O) – Cathy likes cats.
  4. Subject + Verb + Indirect Object + Direct Object(S + V +I +O) – Cathy gives them milk.
  5. Subject + Verb + Direct Object + Object Complement(S + V + O + O/C) – Milk makes them fat.

In the first sentence- Cats mew(S+V) – ‘mew’ is an intransitive verb i.e. it does not need/take a Direct Object to complete its meaning. Let us look at some more examples based on this pattern:

  1. Birds fly.
  2. The peacock danced.
  3. Stars twinkle.
  4. The sun shines.

The verbs used in these sentences are intransitive verbs as they do not take an object. But we can expand these sentences by adding an adverbial (Adv.) or prepositional phrase (PP) or a time element (TE).

  1. Birds fly in the sky. (PP)
  2. The peacock danced beautifully. (Adv.)
  3. Stars twinkle at night. (TE)
  4. The sun shines brightly. (Adv.)

Let us look at some more sentence patterns:

  • Subject + Verb (be- type and become- type) + Noun

Be-type verbs – am, is, are, was, were.

Some become- type verbs – look, remain, turn, and continue.

  1. I am a teacher.
  2. Thomas is a doctor.
  3. They are students.
  4. He was a gentleman.
  5. They were friends.
  6. Julia became an actress.
  • Subject + verb (be-type and become-type) + Adjective

Become-type verbs for this pattern – look, seem, appear, become, taste, turn, sound, smell.

  1. Sheena is honest.
  2. Models are pretty.
  3. William appeared handsome.
  4. The crowd turned nasty.
  • Subject + Verb (be-type) + Adverbial
  1. Ron is here.
  2. They are upstairs.
  3. Nobody is there.
  4. The students are in the class.
  • Subject + Verb (have-type) + Noun

Have-type Verbs – have, has, had, cost, resemble, etc.

  1. Mr. Gibson had a red car.
  2. She resembles her mother.
  3. They own a beautiful bungalow.
  4. Susan has a good sense of humour.
  • It + Verb (be-type) + Time/Atmosphere/ Weather/Distance etc.
  1. It is five O’clock.
  2. It is cold.
  3. It is raining.
  4. It is hundred Kms. from here.