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Basic Grammatical Concepts

This document provides an overview of basic grammatical concepts including number, person, gender, and case. It defines these concepts and provides examples to illustrate them. Number refers to singular and plural forms and can be marked on nouns, pronouns, and subject-verb agreement. Person indicates the speaker, person spoken to, or person spoken about. Case marks words for their syntactic role as subject, object, or possession. Gender distinguishes third person pronouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter.

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Andrea Olivier
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42 views

Basic Grammatical Concepts

This document provides an overview of basic grammatical concepts including number, person, gender, and case. It defines these concepts and provides examples to illustrate them. Number refers to singular and plural forms and can be marked on nouns, pronouns, and subject-verb agreement. Person indicates the speaker, person spoken to, or person spoken about. Case marks words for their syntactic role as subject, object, or possession. Gender distinguishes third person pronouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Uploaded by

Andrea Olivier
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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LESSON 01

BASIC GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS


NUMBER PERSON GENDER AND CASE
WHAT IS A
CONCEPT?
A concept is an abstract idea that fundamentally
underlies the study of any subject or field or
discipline
DEFINITIO
N Concepts are used to make sense of the subject
matter that constitute what we study in different
courses/ disciplines or courses

Concepts are therefore discipline related


WHAT ARE
BASIC
GRAMMATICA
L CONCEPTS?
BASIC GRAMMATICAL
CONCEPTS
Basic grammatical concepts are linguistic terms that denote
abstract ideas that are used to describe, explain or analyse the
relationship between words that pattern together to express a
complete thought in different context.
They are used to generate correct sentences, correct errors and to
express oneself in writing.
Grammatical concepts are different ways of thinking about the
structure of the English sentence
There are many grammatical concepts in the study of the English
sentence
We start with the lower element grammatical concepts of number,
person case and gender
The simplest of all the six concepts but with some
complications for second language learners and users

SINGULAR FORM - ONE / woman/boy/penguin/it, I, she, he

NUMBER PLURAL FORM- TWO OR MORE /


women/boys/penguins/we/they

From these examples we see that number only indicates


the numerable property of words and not their actual
number of items (numerals), however they are connected.
As a grammatical concept, number is morphologically
marked for nouns, pronouns and subject verb concord as
in the following examples:
NUMBER SINGULAR PLURAL
Teacher Teachers (Noun)
EXAMPLES I we (pronoun)
IN She knows the shop
(Concord)
We know the shop

ENGLISH SOME DETERMINERS/ QUANTIFIERS such as this/these,


that/those, every/several/ and each/some/many or some/
also have singular and plural distinctions.
Second Singular Plural
Language She knows the shop We know the shop
(Concord)
Learners’ and
Users’ Number works differently with the verb system in
Challenge with English. the regular and common forms of
the Concept of number are negated: this accounts for concord
errors between the subject and verb of sentences
Number in the third person singular present tense
* She know the shop *We knows the shop
This concept is expressed as follows:
I. First person (the speaker/writer)
II. Second person (the person spoken to)
III. Third person (the person spoken about)

PERSON It is a grammatical concept in the English pronoun


system as in the following examples:
a) I cook the food – first person
b) You cook the food – second person
c) She or He cooks the food – third person
The syntactic concept of case is marked for the subjective, objective and possessive
forms in a sentence.
I. The subjective case: the word or group of words that we speak/write about
such as nouns, noun phrases and pronouns
example: we/the lecturers know the students (pronoun and noun phrase at subject
position)

2. The objective case: a noun or a pronoun which indicates the person


to whom, or the thing to which, the action of the verb happened

CASE example: the teachers know them /the students (pronoun / noun phrase at object
position) direct object
The objective case can also be indirect as in: Thabo gave the car to his wife
Subject = Thabo (the doer of the action)
Direct object = the car (the thing that is affected by the action)
Indirect object = his wife (the person to - or for - whom the action is carried out)
3. the possessive case indicates possession
(ownership).
the pronoun in the possessive case is however,
used as modifier of a noun and can therefore
not be used independently on its own

EXAMPLE: My mother arrived late


Here, “My” is used as a modifier to the noun
mother.
A distinction of gender is strictly made in the english
language for third person singular pronouns.

This is realised by designating the pronouns that stand


for males as masculine and those for females as
feminine while pronouns for things are referred to as
GENDER neuter depend on the context in which they are used.
For examples:
MASCULINE – He knows the book
FEMININE – She knows the book
NEUTER – It is a book

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