Beginners English Grammar

English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words phrases clauses sentences and whole texts. This book describes a generalized present-day Standard English-a form of speech and writing used in public discourse including broadcasting education entertainment government and news over a range of registers from formal to informal. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some historical social cultural and regional varieties of English although these are more minor than differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns and all nouns adjectives and articles grammatical function is indicated only by word order by prepositions and by the ""Saxon genitive or English possessive"". Eight ""word classes"" or ""parts of speech"" are commonly distinguished in English nouns determiners pronouns verbs adjectives adverbs prepositions and conjunctions. Nouns form the largest word class and verbs the second-largest. Unlike nouns in almost all other Indo-European languages English nouns do not have grammatical gender.