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, and sentences, right up to the structure of whole texts.

There are historical, social, cultural and regional variations of English. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some dialects. This article 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 informal. There are differences in grammar between the standard forms of British, American, and Australian English, although these are more minor than differences in vocabulary and pronunciation.

An example of a noun phrase that includes all of the above-mentioned elements is that rather attractive young college student to whom you were talking. Here that is the determiner, rather attractive and young are adjectival pre-modifiers, college is a noun adjunct, student is the noun serving as the head of the phrase, and to whom you were talking is a post-modifier Notice the order of the pre-modifiers; the determiner that must come first and the noun adjunct college must come after the adjectival modifiers.

English determiners constitute a relatively small class of words. They include the articles the, a[n], certain demonstrative and interrogative words such as this, that, and which, possessives such as my and whose (the role of determiner can also be played by noun possessive forms such as John's and the girl's), various quantifying words like all, some, many, various, and numerals (one, two, etc.). There are also many phrases (such as a couple of) that can play the role of determiners.