• Sage has two slowing orb.

number
• She is a fountain of profound knowledge, just like Athena,
the god of wisdom. gender
• She gives I and our teammates healing. case
• Though her healing powers may be slow than Skye, she is
still a reliable support. degree
• She thinks she might have seen the unfamiliar shadowy
figure by the triple boxes.
definiteness
• Apparently, Omen pass by them using his shrouded step. tense
• Before they even knew it, they shot by the enemies. voice
• They lose if all of them would be killed. mood
• Luckily, Jett clutch just in time. tense
 Number

This first category is relatively simple. There are two terms of

this category in English: singular (the concept of one) and
plural (the concept of more than one). Number is expressed
by inflection, generally by -s:

In count nouns (dog/dogs)

In demonstratives (this/these, that/those)
In the 1st and 3rd p of personal pronouns (//we),
possessive determiners (my/our), possessive pronouns
(mine/ours), and reflexive pronouns (myself/ourselves),
but not in the 2nd person. Number is also expressed by
distinct forms of certain pronouns and adjectives:

Singular: every, each, someone, anybody, a/an

Plural: all, many, few, several, most
 N u m b e r is a l s o e x p r e s s e d :

In a limited way in verbs, by the singular -s of

the 3rd p which occurs in the present but not
in the past tense:

he writes versus they write, he wrote.

Number is expressed more fully in the inflected forms of

the verb 'to be' : Singular: am, is, was

Plural: are, were
 GenderGender

• English has a rather straightforward system of

gender called natural gender, as opposed to the
seemingly less motivated system called
grammatical gender. Grammatical gender, the
system found in earlier stages of English, appears
to be arbitrary here.

• Gender is not related to the sex of the object

denoted but is really just a means of sub
classifying nouns as masculine/feminine or
masculine /feminine/neuter.
 Gender
• In contrast, natural gender depends on the sex of
the object in the real world. In this system, we
distinguish masculine, feminine, common or dual
(m or f), and neuter (sexless) genders.

• Gender is expressed by inflection only in

personal pronouns, and only in the 3rd person,
singular: he, she, it

• The 1st and 2nd person forms: /, we, and you

are common gender. While the 3rd person
plural form they is either common gender or
neuter (the people. they, the boats, they).
 • Relative and interrogative pronouns and some other
pronouns inflectionally express a related category of
animacy (animate/inanimate): who, whom, what, which,
somebody/one vs. something, anybody/one vs. anything.

• In nouns, gender is generally a covertcategory shown

by the co-occurrence of relevant pronouns: the
boy...he, the girl...she. However, gender may also be
expressed overtly on the English noun in a number of
limited ways:

1.By derivational suffixes, such as the feminine suffixes -ine (hero/heroine), -

ess (god/ goddess), -rix (aviator/aviatrix), and -ette (suffragist/suffragette) or
the common gender suffixes -er (baker), -ist (artist), -ian (librarian), -ster
(prankster), and -ard (drunkard);

2.by compounds, such as lady-, woman-, girl-, female-, -woman or

boy-, male-, gentleman-,
-man;
3. by separate forms for masculine, feminine, and common genders,
such as
boy/girl/child
or rooster/hen/chicken; and
4.by separate forms for masculine and feminine genders, such as
uncle/aunt, horse/mare, bachelor/spinster and proper names such
 Person
The category of person is quite simple.Three terms are
recognized: 1st person: the speaker, person speaking;
2nd person: the addressee/hearer, person spoken to; and
3rd person: the person or thing spoken about.

Person distinctions are expressed bythe inflected forn1s of the

pronouns, for example:
Personal I You He, they
pronouns:
Personal my your His, their
possesive
determiners:
Personal possesive mine yours His, theirs
pronouns:
Personal reflexive Myself Yourself J-limself, themselves
pronouns:
• Person is also expressed inflectionally in the singular,
present tense, indicative of verbs by the -s inflection on the
3rd person: / write vs. she writes.

• It is also expressed more fully in the verb 'to be': / am/was,

we are/were.

(1st person), you are/were

(2nd person), he/she/it is/was, they are/were (3rd person).

Nouns are all 3rd person, but this is shown only covertly by
the co-occurrence of pronouns: the house...il (*/, •you), the
houses... they (*we, •you).
 Case
Case is one of the more difficult categories. II may be defined rather
simply as an indication of the function of a noun phrase, or the
relationship of a noun phrase to a verb or to other noun phrases in the
sentence.

Case is most fully expressed in the personal and interrogative/relative

pronouns, which distinguish nominative case (the function of subject).

Genitive case (the function of possessor), and

Objective case (the function of object) by different inflected forms:

Nominative: /, we, you, he, she, it, they, who;

Genitive: my/mine, our/ours, his, her/hers, its, their/theirs, whose; and
Objective: me, us, you, him, her, it, them, whom.
 Degree
• Degree is a category that relates to adjectives and adverbs. It has
three terms, positive, comparative, and superlative.

• Positive degree expresses a quality, comparative degree

expresses greater degree or intensity of the quality in one of two
items.
• Superlative degree expresses greatest degree or intensity of the quality
in one of three or more items. The positive degree is expressed by the
root of the adjective (e.g., big, beautifuf) or adverb (e.g., fast, quickly)-
that is, it is null-realized.
• Comparative and superlative degrees are expressed either by
inflection or by periphrasis (using more, most):

Comparative -er, more bigger faster More More quickly

beautiful
Superlative -est, most biggest Fastest Most beautiful Most quickly
 Definiteness
The concepts of definiteness and indefiniteness are
intuitively quite simple:

• Definite denotes a referent (a thing in the real world

denoted by a noun) which is known, familiar, or identified
to the speaker and hearer.
• Indefinite denotes a referent which is novel, unfamiliar, or
not known.
"Definite" and "indefinite" are terms which are usually
applied to noun phrases.
In English, the is referred to as "the definite article", and
a/an as "the indefinite article". Noun phrases which begin
with the (e.g. the Queen or England, the book), which are
also called "definite descriptions", are generally taken to
be prototypical examples of definite noun phrases in
English.
 Ve r b a l c a t e g o r i e s :
Te n s e

Tense is a linguistic category, it has two different forms:

a) I saw a movie last night

b) I wish you would go.

Past tense expresses past time In (a),but it expresses future time in (b). We
see that the present time expresses a timeless habit in (a) and a future time in
(b), neither expressing an action ocurring at the present moment.

Grammatical categories can thus be defined either by formal or informal

means.

By these criteria, English has only two tense distinctions, past and present:
(work/worked).

In the second case however, there is assumed to be a universal set of

grammatical categories and terms, which for tense are past, present, and
future, by periphrasis (as in I will work).
 Aspect
Aspect is a category applicable to English since the so-called
"compound tenses", the perfect and the progressive, are better
treated as expressions of the aspect. Aspect can be defined as
the view taken of an event, or the "aspect" under which it is
considered, basically whether it is seen as complete and whole
(perfective aspect) or as incomplete and ongoing (imperfective
aspect). Aspect can be summarized as follows:

Simple past tense I

Simple present tense went
I go
Simple future tense Will
Past perfect tense I had gone
Present perfect tense I have gone
Future perfect tense I will have gone

Past progressive tense I was going

Present progressive tense I am going
Future progressive tense I will be going
Past perfect progressive tense I had been going

Present perfect progressive I have been going

tense
Future perfect progressive I will have been going
tense
 Mood
• Mood is an indication of the speaker's attitude towards what he
or she is talking about, wether the event is considered fact or
non-fact.
 The indicative is the mood of fact if it is expressed by the simple
and compound tenses of the verb. Non-fact encompasses a
number of different degrees of reality, including wishes, desires,
requests, warnings, prohibitions, commands, predictions
possibilities, and contrary to-fact occurrences. It has two primary
subcategories, the imperative and the subjunctive.

 The imperative is one of the two non-fact moods. It is used to

express direct commands. In English the imperative has a special
syntactic form: it isa subjectless containing a bare form of the verb
as in Go!, Be quiet!, Don't disturb me!

 The subjunctive is o t h e r non-fact mood. In present day English,

the subjunctive is expressed by modal auxilliaries or their phrasal
equivalent as in:
 Voice
The category of voice, though usually considered a category
of the verb, is actually relevant to the entire sentence. Voice is
an indication of whether the subject is performing action of
the verb or being something (active voice) or whether the
subject is being affected by the action or being acted upon
(passive voice). While the active is expressed by the simple
forms of the verb, the passive is expressed periphrastically:

By be + the past participle, as in The report

was written (by the committee); or
By get + the past participle, as in The
criminal got caught (by the police).
 In conclusion...
We can approach the categories from a different
perspective by noting
which different parts of speech each of the grammatical
categories is relevant to:

Nouns: number, gender, case,

(person), and definiteness;
Pronouns: number, gender, case,
and person;
Adjectives and some adverbs:
degree; and
V erbs: number, person, tense,
aspect, mood, and voice.
Determining word classes

Traditionally, eight word classes are recognized: noun, verb,

adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction and
interjection (or article).
 The noun
A noun is a word which is used to denote a person (traffic
warden, woman, Prime Minister, pianist etc.)
A concrete or abstract entity (binoculars, fork, field, truth,
incoherence etc.)
Or a place (office, garden, railway station).

These are all common nouns; there are also proper nouns which are
the names of a specific person, place, event etc., usually starting with a
capital letter, for example: Yo r k , John, Christmas, Saturday.

Proper nouns are distinguished from common nouns in that they

denote a unique referent; they cannot, therefore, be pluralized. Count
nouns denote items that are individuated and can be pluralized and
counted, while mass (noncount) nouns denote substances that exist in
bulk or unspecified quantities.
 The verb
A group of words cannot be described as a sentence or a clause
unless at least one of the words is a verb. In some ways, we can
describe it as the most important part of speech because it is the
'action' word that tells the listener or reader what is happening in
the sentence.

Verbs can be 'action' words like run, initiate, judge, throw, but
they can also denote less active notions and have more to do
with mental processes and perceptions, like see, know, think
and so on.

There are several distributional tests for the category verb;

these serve to subclassify verbs. Certain verbs, known as
transitive verbs, such as buy, break, learn, give, or hit, may
precede noun phrases:
 The adjective

An adjective gives the reader or speaker extra information

about a noun or delimits it in some way. It can occur in two
positions in a phrase:

before the noun as in clear water, beautiful beaches, a

terrible decision. The adjectives in these examples are said
to be attributive.

following any form of the verb be (e.g. am, is, was, been)
and similar verbs (seem, appear ,become) as in the water
became clear, the beaches are beautiful. These
adjectives are inpredicative position.
 The adverb
The traditional approach to adverbs has been to assign mainly those
words which are made from adjectives by the addition of the ending -
ly (quickly, hopelessly), plus certai other words which are difficult to
classify, like not, just and soon.

Their main function is to qualify the action of the verb in the

clause in some way, but they can also be used to add more
information to an adjective or other adverb
e.g. awfully good, incredibly slowly.

The class of adverbs is very wide-ranging in form and is used to

add comments to many of the other word classes.

The category of adverb (Adv) is rather difficult to differentiate. A

small number of what are traditionally recognized as adverbs take
the comparative inflectional endings - er and -est, but most are
uninflected.
 Pronouns

Pronouns are usually treated as a special sub-class of

nouns. This is because they stand in for a noun or group
of nouns. They are limited in number and belong to what
is called a closed set, that is, a group of words to which
new members are, for practical purposes, not allowed.
Some examples of pronouns
are: /, you, he, she, our, its, something, anyone and so
on.
 Prepositions

Prepositions allow us to talk about the way in which two parts

of a sentence are related to each other. They include words
like in, on, under, beside, through, inside, before, opposite.
More often than not, these relationships are to do with either
time or space, but other types of relationship, such as
possession, cause and effect and method can be expressed
by using prepositions.

Unless they are part of a verb (getin, pick up, switch off),
prepositions are always followed by a phrase containing a
noun - at school, in the summer, over the moon and so
on.
 Conjunctions
Conjunctions serve to connect two or more clauses, phrases
or words together to make longer constructions.

There are two types of conjunction. The first is

the coordinating conjunction. This type is always used to
connect elements that share the same grammatical status, that
is, main clause to main clause, verb to verb, noun to noun,
adjective to adjective and so on.

The second type is the subordinating conjunction, which

most often joins two or more unequal clauses to one another.
Typically a main clause will be connected to a subordinate
clause.
 Interjection
An interjection is a word used to express a particular emotion or
sentiment on the part of the speaker.

Filled pauses such as uh, er, um are also considered interjections.

Interjections are often placed at the beginning of a sentence.

An interjection is sometimes expressed as a single word or non­

sentence phrase, followed by a punctuation mark.

Conventions like Hi, Bye and Goodbye are interjections, as are

exclamations like Cheers! and Hooray!. They are very often
characterized by exclamation marks depending on the stress of the
attitude or the force of the emotion they are expressing.
 References
Laurel J. Brinton, Donna Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modem English. Jobn
Benjamins Publishing, 2010. Pages 1-358

Wikipedia. (n.d). Interjection. Retrieved from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1nterjection

TESOL-direct. (n.d). Word classes in English grammar. Retrieved from:

https://www.tesol-direct.com/guide-to-english:9rammar/word-dasses

Grammar -Monster. (n.d). What is the aspect of a Verb? Retrieved from:

http:f/www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/aspect.hlm

Barbara Abbot. Definitie and indefinite. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics,

2nd edition. Retrieved from: https://www.msu.edu/-abbottb/def&inde.pdf