Grammar - Introduction

Grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given language.

The grammar is approached in two different ways: Descriptive and Prescriptive. The descriptive way tries to look at the grammar of any spoken language or dialect as it actually exists and it judges whether a sentence is grammatical or not based on the rules of the speech rather than on a set of rules. The perspective grammar prescribes rules for the proper usage of language.

For MBA Admission Tests, we need to focus on prescriptive grammar.

Parts of Speech

All words in English language are divided into nine categories. These categories are called the Parts of Speech.

1. Nouns: are the names of people, places, animals, things, and abstract ideas.
2. Verbs: are words that indicate what is being done in a sentence, and tell us about the activities of its subject and about states and conditions.
3. Pronouns: are words that are used instead of nouns and have exactly the same functions as nouns.
4. Adjectives: are words that go with or qualify or modify nouns and sometimes pronouns. They are often used to describe the thing that the noun refers to.
5. Adverbs: are words that typically modify verbs. They tell you how, when, where, why or how often an action takes place. They can also modify adjectives, other adverbs and even whole clauses.
6. Determiners: are small words used before nouns to tell you which one, or how many, or whose, and so on. They include articles (a, an, the), demonstratives (this, that, these, those), possessives (my, his, our, ...) and quantifiers (all, some, no, ...).
7. Prepositions: typically come in front of noun phrases and pronouns and tell you how the noun /pronoun is related to the rest of the sentence in terms of place, time, reason and so on.
8. Conjunctions: are joining words that typically link clauses in a sentence. They can also link nouns, pronouns, verbs, etc.
9. Interjection: are words used to express some sudden feeling or emotion and they are not grammatically related to the other words in a sentence. For example: Hello! Alas! Hurrah! Ah! Oh! Well! etc.                                                    NEXT