The Real Rules of English Grammar

Written By Harry Ritchie
 

Introduction

The real grammar of English has nothing to do with what you might think of as grammar – semi-colons, proper meanings, correct spelling and suchlike. As defined by linguistics, the grammar of a language consists of the rules governing the way words are used together and the way words change form to add meaning, like adding an “s” to turn a noun plural.

In English, some of these grammatical rules have become life-definingly important, with the occasionally weird forms of middle-class English acting as secret passwords – if you don’t use middle-class grammar, you don’t get into the middle class.

Yet despite their enormous importance, the rules of our grammar are never explained – or rather, they are taught to the couple of billion people who are trying to learn English as a foreign language but they have never been taught to us native English speakers.

There are about 3,500 of these rules in total – you are consciously aware of hardly any of them, perhaps none. Even so, you know every item of English grammar inside out. Gerunds, the second conditional, the three main functions of the present perfect, phrasal verbs – they befuddle everyone trying to learn our language but you use their rules, and all the 3,500-odd others, with unerring expertise.

That’s because you are a linguistic genius. If you are not suffering a severe neurological impairment, and if you are old enough to tell the time, then you use English with brilliant, Nobel-prize-winning expertise. No matter your education or your IQ, no matter your income or your class, your accent, your nationality, your skin colour, your religion or your favourite film – you enjoy total and truly wonderful command of English. Especially the grammar.

That is probably not what you think. You probably think something closer to the opposite. But that is only because you are very probably a linguistic ignoramus. If English is your first language, then it's almost certain that, no matter your education or your IQ, your income, class, accent, nationality, skin colour, religion or favourite soup, you know next-to-nothing about language in general and English in particular.

This is not your fault, and it’s not just you personally but just about everyone who speaks English – almost all of us English speakers are linguistic ignoramuses, because we have been so badly misled and mistaught. There is no good reason for this: the knowledge we need is basically very straightforward; it is uniquely accessible since we are already experts, and it has been around for a while – most of the material on this site would have been considered new about a hundred years ago. But we English speakers have not been taught any of it.

This is odd. In other languages, the rules and regulations of their grammars are taught to their own speakers. Instead, we have been given either nothing or the stern and strange commands of traditional “grammar”, a hotch-potch of made-up rules, decrees about supposedly correct forms and meanings, and matters of literary etiquette, like the proper use of the semi-colon. Piffle.

Making it all the more extraordinary that we are taught none of it, knowledge of standard English grammar is horribly important. Because, in English, people who speak the standard dialect accept only standard grammar and reject all other dialect variations as mistakes.

As I explain in the ebook, The Wrongs of English, this has happened because ours is a language grammatically divided by class. We accept this as normal – in fact, not only is it very strange, it is unique. There are something like 6,000 languages currently spoken on our planet – English is the only one with a class division, where the middle-and-above classes everywhere all speak the same version of the language, using the same grammatical rules of the standard dialect, and the below-middle classes use the grammars of all the non-standard, regional dialects.

The result is that in English, and only in English, the middle and above classes think theirs is the only correct grammar in all contexts, spoken as well as written, and reject all the working-class, regional versions as wrong. This applies not only in class-bound Britain but throughout the US and every other country where English is the first language.

This has not happened in any other language, where dialects are defined only by region and not at all by class, and are therefore not rejected. In other languages, all sorts of people speak in their regional dialect when they are in their own regions – professors, executives, landowners, doctors . . . In other languages, dialects are respected, often loved. Only in English are they despised and dismissed.

There is no linguistic justification for this rejection: as this guide shows throughout, the working-class versions are not only as rule-governed as their middle-class equivalents, they are more rule-governed. Nonetheless, these perfectly valid differences in the grammars are treated by middle-class, standard speakers as mistakes, as signs of low education, low intelligence and general unfitness for civilised purpose. So in English, and only in English, standard grammar operates as a secret password system – use a non-standard grammatical form like “youse”, “they was” or “I seen” and you don’t get in to the middle-class.

This may seem a huge and intractable problem but it is easily solved – all that is needed to end the dire abuse of our wonderful language is for us to be taught it properly. As it is being taught to the two billion people who can’t speak English like us. As it could have been taught to us about a hundred years ago.

Although some of it may seem startling and novel, this account is the opposite of cutting-edge. Academic linguists are currently mulling over a clutch of competing theories about grammar and ways to analyse a language, often quite different from the one I have taken, which is very conventional and based on good old-fashioned word-classes – nouns, verbs and so on.

This is also nothing like a complete account. Given that there are about 3,500 grammatical rules in English, I have included only the most basic and important, where the middle-class standard and working-class non-standard dialects diverge. Almost all of the 3,500-odd grammatical rules are the same in all the different versions of English, in every country and every region. However, on those relatively few occasions when there are differences between the standard dialect and the others, these act as the grammatical passwords to middle-class membership. Each difference has been highlighted.

Treating working-class non-standard and middle-class standard forms together and alike may seem preposterous. But such a comparison would not be preposterous in any other language. All that is causing the preposterousness in English is empty class prejudice.

 

Nouns

Definition

The traditional definition is that nouns are the words for things, people and places. The words for things – “girl”, “boat”, “toaster” – are called common nouns. The names of places or people or the titles of institutions etc are called proper nouns and have a capital letter – “Bob”, “Birmingham”, “Bible”, “Boeing”. Abstract nouns refer to ideas or qualities or any other mental creation that has no actual physical existence – “Buddhism”, “beauty”, “boastfulness”. About two-thirds of our words are nouns.

More sophisticated definition

The traditional definition doesn’t quite work because it tries to fit words into a fixed category and a language doesn’t operate with a dictionary’s neat classifications. Words which are usually nouns can also be, for example, adjectives (“Chicago pizza”, “Taylor Swift song”). Equally, words which are usually adjectives can be nouns (“The good, the bad and the ugly”, “Do you have this in a large?”) Verbs turn into nouns when they become gerunds with an -ing ending – “Smoking is forbidden”, “Your cooking is great” (see Gerunds).

In fact, as with all the word-classes, the term “noun” refers to a function rather than a category – a word is a noun if it fills a noun slot. “What did you think of the ---?” Filling that space could be a word normally thought of as a noun – “film”, “car”, “suggestion”, “psychotherapist” – but also words usually found in other word-classes – “yellow”, “small”, “ifs and buts”, “whys and wherefores”. A word is a noun if it is acting as a noun.

Rules

There are very few rules governing English’s nouns and they are very simple. Other European languages have various different forms for each noun. (Basque has approximately half a million.) English’s nouns don’t change form even to indicate if they’re a subject (the doer of the action in a sentence) or an object (the done-to). English relies on word-order alone to show which is which – “the dog (subject) bit the man” (object) versus “the man (subject) bit the dog” (object).
English’s nouns can make just one change – adding an “s”, either to make a plural (“one girl”, “two girls”) or to mark a possessive – “the girl’s toaster” = the toaster possessed by the girl.

Irregular nouns

There is a small group of irregular nouns which form a plural not by adding an “s” but with a different change to the word – brother / brethren, child / children, foot / feet, goose / geese, louse / lice, man / men, mouse / mice, ox / oxen, tooth / teeth, woman / women. These are the few survivors of the more complicated Germanic noun systems of Old English. In fact, in the cases of “brethren” and “oxen”, the old plural has survived where the things they are describing have disappeared from everyday life.

There are also some nouns that do not add an “s” for a plural – for example, “sheep”, “deer” and “fish”. Others do not have a singular – for example, “clothes”, “scissors”, “trousers”, “binoculars”, and, in British English, “maths”.

Countable and uncountable nouns

There is one other rule for our nouns because they are divided into two distinct grammatical categories, defined by countability. “Count” or “countable” nouns are those which English thinks can be separated and counted – “three cups”, “four saucers”, “sixty-five million years ago”. “Uncountable” or “uncount” nouns are ones which English takes to be indivisible, a single mass or one entity – “salt”, “flour”, “weather”. Because they describe one overall thing, they don’t normally have a plural form. Although they are singular, uncountable nouns are not preceded by an “a” or “an” (since these specify a counted number – one), so we don’t talk about “a furniture” or “a sand”. Uncountable nouns sometimes also require different “determiner” words – “much”, “less” and “least” (see Determiners). Abstract nouns are assumed to be uncountable – we wouldn’t normally talk about “three Buddhisms” or “four courages” – and therefore act as singulars, as in “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and “strength in unity”.

Collective nouns

Traditional grammars tend to pad out their Nouns chapters with long lists of collective nouns, many of them invented only for such lists – a spreadsheet of accountants and so on. Purely page-filling. However, our collective nouns do cause some grammatical anxiety, because, according to the traditional textbooks, they are said to act as singulars (“The herd of oxen is”; “the flock is”) but in reality that is often not the case. This is particularly noticeable in British English, middle-class standard and working-class non-standard dialects alike, where some singular collective nouns – like “team”, “family” and “government” – usually or always behave as plurals: “the team are playing well”; “the government have messed it up”. Nobody in the English-speaking world would ever say “The police is investigating”. A sports team always acts as a plural in British English (“Man United are losing”, “India are playing Australia”), and singular names or nouns to do with business often but not always come with plural verbs – “the company are investing”, “Shell have announced”. In American English, however, sports teams and the like can have singular verbs if the name is singular – “the Steelers are winning” but “Harvard has beaten Yale”.

Middle-class and working-class nouns

There is only one noticeable occasion when middle-class standard and working-class non-standard nouns have different rules. Every version of English apart from standard makes a distinction between counting and measurement: the normal plural applies if the noun is being counted – “one potato, two potatoes, three potatoes” – but if the noun is being measured, taken as a whole rather than counted as a series of individual items, then in all working-class, non-standard dialects, it becomes a singular like an uncountable noun – “she ran for three mile”, “twenty dollar that cost me”. However, in the middle-class standard dialect only, plural forms are used – “she ran for three miles”, “you owe me twenty dollars”. Usually, but not always: most middle-class standard speakers would describe someone as “six foot five” or “ten stone three”. (However, my guess is that most standard speakers, were they to add the final noun, would make it a plural – “three pounds”, “five inches”). [PASSWORD CONSTRUCTION]
Considering that they form about two-thirds of our vocabulary, it is remarkable that the nouns themselves do not differ much between dialects, including between all non-standards and standard. The huge number of distinctive nouns that used to be everyday items of non-standard dialects’ vocabulary in the olden days has dwindled to, relatively, few. Instead of the old, specific, rural words, regional, working-class dialects now have the shared terms of the modern world – “download”, “airport”, “oxygen” and “phone” are the same in Scouse, Geordie and deepest West Virginian. This has left most dialects, especially urban ones, retaining a very small core of its own distinctive nouns, which I think many people cling to with pride as identity-markers – like “pavement” in Philadelphia or Aberdeenshire’s “loons” and “queans”.
So for dialect-switchers, nouns present relatively few problems – there aren’t very many to switch and those are among the most obvious to spot and change – delete “lug”, replace with “ear”. Nevertheless, noun-switching is still a uniquely undermining process in English. In other languages, the switch is from a regional word to the official word, with no judgements attached: in English, it is seen as ditching a somehow-laughable, wrong word and replacing it with the “correct”, “proper” term. This is not so – “oxter” is just as excellent a word as “armpit”. There is nothing in the sound of “poke” that makes it coarser or otherwise worse than “bag”. There’s nothing wrong with “nowt” or "nuttin", nothing better about “nothing”.
 

Determiners

Definition

Determiners are the little words like “the”, “a” and “this” which go before nouns to identify them in some way.

The

“The” is the most used word in English. It is called the definite article, because it defines its noun – if you say, “the man bit the dog” you are talking about a specific man and a particular dog.
Like our other determiners, “the” doesn’t change form with different kinds of noun – unlike, say, French, which has “le” for masculine nouns, “la” for feminine nouns and “les” for plurals, or German whose definite article comes in six different forms. English has one – “the”.
Like our other determiners, “the” always comes before its noun in English – “he bit dog the” is a grammatical mistake in every dialect of English, one that a native speaker could make only if suffering significant brain damage because it is so basic. Basic but not necessary – in some languages, the equivalent of “the” comes after its noun. In fact, articles themselves are also basic but not necessary – about a third of the world’s languages do without any articles whatsoever.

A/an

These are called the indefinite articles because their reference is vague – “a man bit a dog”: you don’t know which man or which dog. We use “a” if the word following it starts with a consonant, “an” if it starts with a vowel. It doesn’t matter how the next word is spelled – we always follow the actual sound of the word, not how it’s written, so it’s “a university”, “an hour” and “an LA swimming-pool”.
Unlike “the”, “a” and “an” don’t turn up with plurals, for the obvious reason that they refer to one item. Indefiniteness in the plural – ie, if there’s more than one thing being vaguely or generally referred to – is shown by the absence of any articles: “dogs chase cats”; “swimming pools are great in hot countries”.
We don’t normally use “a” or “an” before nouns that English classifies as uncountable. “A salt”, “a furniture”, “an information” can’t exist, because although they’re referring to a singular thing, “a” and “an” are still counting their nouns, still giving them a number – one.
We never have any problem with “the”, “a” and “an” but they can be one of the most difficult features of our grammar for a non-native speaker to learn, even if that non-native’s own language does have articles, because there are so many little regulations governing their use, and many of the kind that may be little but are devilishly hard to explain, far less learn. Take countries, for example: most of them don’t have any article in front of them – “a Germany” and “the France” are mistakes – but ”the” is used with those which have a noun that announces their status – “the US”, “the UK”, “the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe”.

Non-standard variations

These rules apply to middle-class standard English and most of the time to working-class non-standard dialects as well, although Yorkshire’s reduction of “the” to “t” is noticeable, and in some north-English dialects, “the” can be dropped completely – “I’m going across road”. But by and large, there are few differences between standard and other dialects in their determiners. Perhaps the most prevalent is the use of “the” before “both” – “the both of you”. Irish and Scottish (and I think some American) dialects can also use “the” before words like “hospital” or “school” or some illnesses, where standard and other dialects don’t – “He got the Covid so bad he had to go to the hospital”.

This / that, these / those

These are officially termed “demonstratives”. They are our “pointing words”, specifying by distance – “this” and “these” = near, “that” and “those” = further away.
Old English once had a three-way pointing system, for near, far, and even further away. This has been kept in some Scottish dialects, which have “this”, “that” and “yon” or “thon”. (“Not that boy. Yon boy ower there, ill with the measles.”)

Many / much, few / little

These determiners specify quantity. The two basic pairs are “many” and “much”, and their opposites, “few” and “little”. There are two words in each pair because they apply separately to countable and uncountable nouns – “many” and “few” go with countable nouns, “much” and “little” with uncountables. “Many Americans have little money”: “Few presidents have had time to play much golf”.

“Many” and “much” have the same comparative and superlative forms – “more” and “most” – where “few” has “fewer” and “fewest”, and “little” has “less” and “least”.

Sticklers can get very passionate and vocal about the few-little / fewer-less distinction (see Less / fewer in Made-Up Rules) – but for almost all English speakers, the default is “less” with countable as well as uncountable nouns.

Other quantifiers include measuring words such as “half” and numbers.

Which / what

These two determiners are used in questions. Like “the” and “a / an”, “which” and “what” are used separately for nouns that are specific or general. “Which twin do you fancy?” “What time is the poolside party?” “Which of his three mankinis will he actually wear?”

Sequencing of determiners

When two or more determiners turn up together, they do so in strict sequence, just as with the ordering of different sorts of adjective. First come some quantifiers like “all”, “both”, and “half”, then articles and demonstratives, then numbers and other quantifiers, including “many / much” etc – “half of the thirty people in the pool were still wearing clothes”; “both of those mankinis are splendid".
 

Adjectives

Definition

Adjectives are describing words, and the words they describe are nouns – “the loud party”, “the crowded pool”, “the splendid mankini”.

Further definition

As with all the word-classes, “adjective” isn’t a category but a function. So, for example, words that are normally nouns can fill an adjectival slot – “the Hollywood pool”, “the Versace mankini”. (Equally, words that are normally adjectives can happily fill noun slots – “lime-green is the new black”, “the long and the short of it”.)**

Rules

In its basics English’s grammar is about as basic as any human language’s can get, and our adjectives mostly show our grammar at its simplest and most straightforward. In some other languages, adjectives change form according to the noun they are describing. English’s adjectives, by contrast, always stay the same and don’t get up to any grammatical tricks. Our adjectives also reliably turn up in the same two slots – (1) after the determiner and before the noun, as in “the loud party”, or (2) after some “link” verbs, like “be”, “seem” and “get” (“it’s getting cloudy”, “that mankini is lime-green”).There are a couple of pernickety rules. These apply to all English dialects, standard and regional non-standard.

Pernickety rule number 1 – Some adjectives appear only before nouns and not with link verbs – “chief”, “former”, “future”, “main”, “principal”, “sheer” and “utter”. Others appear after link verbs and not before nouns – “glad” and “well” plus a small group of others which all begin with “a” (“abroad”, “alike”, “alive”, “alone”, “ashamed” and “asleep”).

Just to complicate matters, there are a very few adjectives which can appear before nouns and after link verbs but with a change of meaning, such as “heavy/ light” and “early / late”: “the late train wasn’t late”, “Maybe she’s so light because she’s such a heavy drug user”.

Pernickety rule number 2 applies to adjectives which are created from verbs and have different meanings for the “ing” and “ed” forms. (The “ing” forms of verbs are called present participles; “ed” forms are past participles). Sometimes the meanings are obviously different, sometimes subtly. Adjectives using the “ing” form are active, having some sort of effect: those using “ed” are passive, on the receiving end. “I am boring so you are bored”; “The film was frightening so the audience was terrified”; “The partygoers were appalled because his mankini was so revolting”.

Comparatives and superlatives

The only time when English’s adjectives change form is with the comparatives and superlatives of a handful of irregular adjectives. These are the irregular forms of middle-class standard English:

  • good, better, best
  • bad, worse, worst
  • many/much, more, most
  • little, less, least
  • far, further, furthest
  • old, elder, eldest (usually with people, where the regular form – old, older, oldest – can apply to everything, including people)

Many non-standard dialects allow regular forms for these like “badder” and “goodest”, which are always seen by standard speakers as errors. PASSWORDS

Forming comparatives and superlatives

There are two ways of turning an adjective into a comparative and superlative. One is to put “more” and “most” before the adjective, the other is to add an “er” or “est” to the end. Middle-class standard prefers “more” and “most” except before short, one- or two-syllable words – “dafter”, “stupidest”, but “most idiotic”. However, working-class non-standard dialects have tended to use “more” and “most” together with the “er” and “est” endings with short and longer adjectives – “most greatest”, “more expensiver”. If those seem like glaring errors, let’s remember that a double superlative was good enough for Shakespeare, who has Julius Caesar declaring, on being stabbed by Brutus, “This was the most unkindest cut of all”. As with double negatives, the repetition is used for emphasis but it is always seen as a gross error in the traditional grammar manuals and often in real life because many standard speakers think double superlatives like “more lovelier” and “most handsomest” are wrong. PASSWORD CONSTRUCTION. Because the comparatives are the only time when English’s adjectives vary at all, these are the forms which traditional grammarians have pounced on to apply their own, invented rules (see Made-Up Rules).

Gradable / ungradable

One of the invented rules of traditional grammar is that some adjectives should be ungradable – ie, not modified or measured in any way – because their meaning is of an extreme, 100-per cent, all-or-nothing kind. So traditionalists claim that something can’t be “very perfect” or “most complete”. The only trouble is that these are things that many of us do say, and with good reason and effect. And because many of us do that, that’s the grammar. (The traditionalists’ ban might ring with timeless authority but it’s actually something they made up relatively recently – the Victorians and their immediate descendants were very fond of phrases like “most perfect”.) Unnoticed by the traditionalists, there is an actual division because lots of our adjectives really are ungradable and can’t be preceded by a word like “very” or a “more” or “extremely” – “third”, “half” and most of the vocabulary of arithmetic, for example.

Some adjectives straddle the division and can be used both ways –

ungradably: “the French president”; “an international match”; “a binary star system”
gradably : “a very French attitude”; “a more international cast”; “a very binary view of the world”.

Adjectival ordering

This has to be the most complicated of all our grammar’s rules – the system governing the sequencing of our adjectives.English’s grammar stipulates that when we put different kinds of adjective together, they have to arrive in a certain order. It has to be a “little black dress” and a “big green dinosaur” and “extra-large purple trousers” because size adjectives come before colour ones. That is why “yellow big taxi” and “Red Little Riding Hood” sound wrong. Similarly, Elvis has to be wearing “blue suede shoes” because colour adjectives come before ones describing a material. And it has to be a “lovely, old, Japanese dish” because opinion comes before age which comes before origin.

This is the basic overall sequence:

Opinion Size Age Shape Colour Origin Material Purpose
Big green
Blue suede
Little Red Riding
Lovely old green Japanese
Gorgeous big old round brown Welsh wooden dining

Although it should go without saying, this sequence applies throughout all dialects of English, non-standard and standard alike. For example, a broad-Scottish speaker might praise a “bonnie wee wan-year-auld roond broon Sassenach bairn”, or an African-American could describe a “sweet li’l ole roun red Mexican ceramic mixin bowl.”

 

Pronouns

Definition

Most academic linguists now treat pronouns as a sub-set of nouns, but this website is going to stick with the traditional categorisation of pronouns as a separate word-class and with the traditional definition, that pronouns are the mostly little words which can take the place of nouns. More accurately, pronouns can take the place of noun phrases. “The big dog bit the small man” – “it bit him”: the pronouns have replaced the “the”s and the adjectives as well as the nouns. Even long noun phrases can be replaced by one brief pronoun: “the horrible, big, red dog with the stubby tail and lopsided ears bit the small, rabbit-faced apprentice chef” – “it bit him”.

Personal pronouns

There are various kinds of pronoun – relative, interrogative, demonstrative, etc – which we use a lot, but the most common of all are the personal pronouns. They are some of our most used words but our personal pronouns have come to present some very tricky problems. This is because our personal pronouns belong to the one area of our otherwise simple and minimalist grammar where our words behave more like words in other European languages, with various changes of form. There are not many changes but enough to cause many of us real difficulties, thanks to those pesky, meddling, interfering eedjits from the traditional “grammar” school.

The personal pronouns of standard English

Subject Object Possessive with a noun Possessive instead of a noun Reflexive
First person singular I me my mine myself
Second person singular you you your yours yourself
Third person singular he him his his himself
she her her hers herself
it it its its itself
First person plural we us our ours ourselves
Second person plural you you your yours yourselves
Third person plural they them their theirs themselves

Shared differences of personal pronouns

There are a couple of very significant occasions where all non-standard dialects share the same conspicuous difference from middle-class standard, because it is the standard dialect that has gone slightly wonky. One obvious divergence happens when middle-class standard has “you” for both singular and plural, whereas working-class non-standards make the distinction with “youse” or, in parts of the US, “you all”. It’s a perfectly sensible addition but in the real world “youse” in particular is deemed unfit for middle-class ears. The other, less obvious, universal difference happens in the third person, where standard’s reflexives break the pattern of being formed from the possessive (“my” / “your” / “our” + “self” / “selves”) by using the object form instead – “him” + “self”, “them” + “selves”. Non-standard dialects keep to the pattern by using the possessive form – “hisself” and “theirselves”. These are regular, rule-obeying words – it’s only because they are spoken by the working class that these perfectly valid reflexives are frowned on and banned. PASSWORDS

“Between you and I” – standard’s problems with subject and object pronouns

Our pronoun system is the only one in English which, to use the proper linguistic terminology, inflects for case – ie, where a word has different forms to show if it’s a subject (“I”), an object (“me”) or a possessive (“my”, “mine”). The possessive doesn’t seem to cause us any difficulties, but the subject-object differentiation certainly does. Since “you” and “it” don’t change form for case, there are only five problematic pairs – I / me, he / him, she / her, we / us and they / them. A mere five, but enough to cause havoc.

Looking at this with the scientific objectivity of linguistics, English’s pronouns do behave strangely with their case-markings – in all dialects, standard and non-standard. It seems to me that we use subject pronoun forms (I, he, she, we and they) only when the pronoun is in a very obviously subject position and on its own: otherwise we use the object form.

That rule applies when a pronoun appears with another pronoun or a noun – “my brothers and me went to the cinema”; “her and him have always been close”; “Bob and me will be going”. These are object pronouns in obviously subject positions. This is an odd feature of English and quite why it exists has stumped linguists but it’s obviously the case that in such situations we default to the object form, even though we’d never contemplate saying anything like “her went to the cinema” or “me will be going”. But the only people I know who don’t default to the object pronouns and actually say “you and I are” or “Bob and he went” are professionally involved in the dissemination of standard English – teachers, journalists, publishing folk. Everyone else I know or have ever met goes for the object form – “you and me are”, “Bob and him went”.

In the rational, sane analysis of linguistics’ purely descriptive approach to grammar, this is to be accepted as an odd and very intriguing quirk of ours – we use object pronouns in subject positions; worth a stroke of the chin but nothing to get upset about. Alas, no, because the traditional grammarians can’t stand the apparent illogic of it. They are adamant that the subject form has to be used in such pairs. This sounds unnatural, especially if the other word in the pair is a name – “I and Big Dave went to the cinema”. Really? Yes, maintains Paul Brians in Common Errors in English Usage – “If you refer to yourself first, the same rule applies. It’s not ‘Me and Jim are going’ but ‘I and Jim are going’”. Some have tried to get out of this traditionalists’ conundrum by calling on the etiquette that one should never put oneself first, so it should always be “Big Dave and I”. Nice try.

According to the daft rules of traditional “grammar”, the subject pronoun should also be used after “to be” verbs. Therefore, they say that the “correct” answer to “Who is it?” is “It is I” and to “Who did this?” is “It was she”. Why do the traditionalists think this? Well, there’s no good reason, but the one they cite is the equivalent construction in Latin, where the subject pronoun is used – “ego est”. (Then again, it’s the object pronoun in French – “c’est moi” – so why bother with Latin? Good question.)

Similarly, traditionalists also wrongly demand the subject forms of pronouns after comparative phrases like “different than” or “better than” and even prepositions such as “apart from” or “except”. To demonstrate the continuing confusion, here are examples of barking over-correction from some highly regarded contemporary novelists. From James Smythe’s The Echo – “He knows what he’s doing better than even I.” In Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster – “maybe no one but she could see it”. From David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks – “as heavy as I”. Finally, from the writing of Daniel Everett, one of the most important linguists in the world – “he had faced the same hardships as they”.

The sense that the subject pronouns are the correct, polite, proper forms has led to their anxious, hypercorrected use in clearly object positions – “for you and he”, “with my husband and I”. Lots of English speakers go for a hypercorrect form, especially “I” in an object position: here’s Eton-and-Oxford-educated British prime minister David Cameron – “what drives Nick Clegg and I”.

My advice is to use the normal, object pronouns in object positions. If you’re not sure, take out the other element and see what it sounds like if the uncertain pronoun is left on its own – “what drives I”? “for he”?

Gender - he / she / it

The “he”, “she” and “it” pronouns really are the only time when English has a gender system – now-frowned-upon nouns like “actress” and “waitress” are gender-specific but they are grammatically normal, no different from any other nouns.

“Gender” in linguistics means a type or group of nouns which are grammatically distinct – for instance, the way that French’s masculine and feminine nouns require different forms of determiners and adjectives. As in French, and in most languages which do have gender systems in their nouns, the groups are indeed differentiated by sexual gender but other kinds are available. Hence the twenty-plus genders of Fulfulde in west Africa, or the four groups of nouns in Dyirbal, an endangered language now spoken by no more than a few dozen people in Australia – (1) men and most living things (2) women, fire and dangerous things (3) edible fruit and vegetables (4) everything else.

English's gender-marking promptly disappears with the third-person plural, where there is only one, gender-free form – "they". As the gender-free option, “they” is often used as a singular when the gender is irrelevant or isn’t known – “someone has left their bag”; “I answered the phone but they just hung up”. (For the he / they debate, see Made-Up Rules.

What English lacks is an impersonal pronoun, like “Man” in German or “on” in French. Perhaps inspired by French’s “on”, elite, RP-speaking standard tried out “one”, but unlike French, where “on” has become the most popular pronoun for lots of speakers, used whenever it possibly can be, “one” has failed to shake off its snooty reputation in English and is now used by a tiny minority. So all dialects of English have to face the same problem – how to use a third-person pronoun in the singular and keep things impersonal. Sometimes we use a singular “they”, as above. Often we use “you” – “when you marry for money, you earn every penny”. Occasionally, "we" is drafted in – “we take the value of pi to be 3.14”.

Stepping confidently into this big gap in our language is “man” – the creation of the new dialect that has emerged from London’s inner-city estates, technically termed Multicultural London English. This use of “man” is arguably the first successful, new pronoun in English for the last thousand years, since “they”, “them” and “their” emerged in the dialects of east England under the Norse influence of invading Vikings and Danes. “Man” has really caught on in MLE, and many speakers use it as often as French speakers can use “on”, usable in the slots of just about every other pronoun – “I”, “he”, “she”, “you”, “they”, “we” – the lot, really, bar “it”. “Man don’t care,” claims Jme; “Man’s not hot,” says Big Shaq in his spoof: grime in particular and London’s coolness in general combine to give MLE enormous soft power – it’s by far the most influential dialect in the UK – so there’s a good chance that “man” as a pronoun might spread.

The recent emergence into the culture of non-binary and trans people has seen various attempts to create not an impersonal pronoun but a non-gender-specific singular pronoun to add to “he” and “she”. The most obvious choice is “they” as a singular but entirely new pronouns have been proposed, like “sie” and “zie”.

Relative pronouns – standard and non-standard

There are several differences between the relative pronouns of middle-class standard and the other dialects because “who” and “which” are creations of standard and still don’t feature in many people’s speech, particularly if theirs is a rural dialect. It’s still only middle-class standard that uses “whom”, which has never caught on in any other dialect (and uncertainly in standard). Many regional varieties, especially in the south and midlands of England, use “as” and “what” where standard uses “that”, “which” or “who” – “I know someone as can fix that”; “the secret what I told you”. These are stigmatised. PASSWORDS

 

Verbs

Definition

Verbs are “doing” words – they describe an action. At least, that’s the traditional definition, which doesn’t really cover verbs that don’t seem to do anything by way of any action – verbs like “seem”, for example. A more up-to-date definition would now be that a word is a verb if it fills a verb slot and behaves like a verb with its endings.

Form

Verbs in other languages can get very complicated, with changes to their form according to who was doing the action, how many people were doing it, when it happened, and various other terms and conditions. Latin had 120 different forms for each verb. Bulgarian verbs have nearly 3,000. Almost all English verbs have just four – “walk, walks, walking, walked”. Some of our verbs, like “put” and “set” have three.

Regular verbs

In all dialects of English, standard and non-standard, regular verbs form the same tenses in the same way, with hardly any variations. The most obvious exception is that standard English adds an “s” to the simple present in the third person singular – “he / she / it walks” – whereas many non-standard dialects have the same form of verb throughout, usually with an “s” all the time (“I says”, “we goes”), although in African-American English and East Anglian the “s” doesn’t appear at all (“I go, you go, she go”). Not following the irregular pattern in standard is a serious linguistic offence for many standard speakers, so this is one of the password constructions. PASSWORD

Here is how the regular verb “walk” changes according to the thirteen tenses in standard and non-standard.

Standard Non-standard
Simple present walk (+ walks for 3rd person sing.) walk or walks throughout
Present continuous am / is / are walking however “be” declines + walking
Present perfect has / have walked has / have walked
Present perfect continuous has / have been walking has / have been walking
Simple past walked walked
Past continuous was / were walking was / were walking
Past perfect had walked had walked
Past perfect continuous had been walking had been walking
Future will / shall walk will walk
Future perfect will / shall have walked will have walked
Future perfect continuous will / shall have been walking will have been walking
Conditional would walk would walk
Past conditional would have walked would have walked
 

The tables are almost identical – with our regular verbs the only differences between standard and non-standard are in the continuous tenses, when the helping (“auxiliary”) verb changes in middle-class standard but not in non-standard. For example, standard has “I was walking” but “we were walking”, whereas working-class non-standards would have either “was” or “were” throughout, giving constructions like “I were seeing” or “they was going”. (Many dialects in the south of England use “was” throughout for positive constructions and “weren’t” throughout for negatives.)

The tenses work in the same way and with the same meaning for all dialects of English almost always. One noticeable exception is the African-American helping verbs “be” and “been” – used with emphasis, they have an extra meaning of strong continuation: in African-American English, “Ah bin married,” means a long and still-thriving marriage, whereas in all other dialects it tends to imply a divorce, possibly some time ago.

Simple present and present continuous – I walk / I am walking

Forms – Most of us native speakers may be unaware of it but English has two present tenses – the simple present and the present continuous. In all dialects of English, the simple present is formed by either the stem of the verb or the stem plus an “s” throughout: only in standard is there a change, with the stem used throughout apart from the third person singular, which adds an “s” (“I love, you love, he / she / it loves, we, you and they love”).

To make the present continuous tense, we use the present tense of “to be” as an auxiliary (helping) verb, plus the main verb with an “ing” added to the end – in standard English, “I am wittering, you are wittering, he / she / it is wittering, we, you and they are wittering”. Many non-standard dialects differ because they have more regular versions of “to be”, and some have a slightly different ending – so, in African-American English, the present continuous declines as “I be lookin, you be lookin, she / he / it be lookin, we be lookin, you all be lookin and they be lookin”.

Functions – By and large, we use the simple present tense to describe actions which happen usually or all the time, and the present continuous for actions that are happening at the moment. “in the UK, people drive on the left” – the simple present because that applies always, not just from time to time, which in this case would be disastrous. “Prunella drives a hard bargain” – the simple present because that’s a description of Prunella’s character, of who she is all the time, rather than of what she’s doing at this particular moment.

For actions happening right now, we use the present continuous: “Prunella is driving erratically”; “Hildegard is driving off the fourteenth tee”. Hence the difference between “what are you doing?” and “what do you do?” – the first question in the present continuous asks about what you’re up to at that moment, the second in the simple present is a general enquiry about your working life. “I drink red wine” – yes, indeed, but not during the day, so, at the time of writing this paragraph, “I am drinking a cup of coffee”.

This may all seem obvious and natural to us native English speakers – but only to us. The very fact of us having two present tenses can itself be an enormous early obstacle for people trying to learn English if their own language has just the one present tense, like French.

There are occasions when the simple present is used for times other than the present. In some projections that start with a word like “when”, we teleport into the future and make it the present – “When I fall in love, it will be forever”; “By the time she graduates, she will be horribly in debt.”

Conversely, the simple present is also used to describe events which are definitely in the past with a storytelling immediacy – “So Archimedes gets out of the bath and he shouts, ‘Eureka!’”

Present perfect and present perfect continuous – I have walked / I have been walking

Form – For people learning English as a foreign language, these are probably the two single most difficult structures in our language. The form is easy enough – “has” or “have” + the past tense of the verb – “I have talked”, “you have heckled”, “he has slept soundly”, “it has been a washout”. For the present perfect continuous, we use “has” or “have” plus “been” plus the main verb with an “ing” ending – “I have been talking”, “you have been heckling”, “he has been sleeping soundly”. (But note that “it has been being a washout” isn’t possible – because of the “been being” combination, “be” is rarely used in the present perfect continuous.)

Functions – The problem with the present perfect isn’t the form, it’s the function. Or, rather, functions, since there are three main contexts where it can be used. In all three, there has to be some sort of relationship between the past and the present.

Recently completed action – “I have just sat on a tomato”. Normally, if we specify that an action is finished, and therefore definitely in the past, we have to use the simple past tense but we can use the present perfect or present perfect continuous if the finished action is very close to the present.

Action that started in the past and continues into the present – “I have worked here man and boy for thirty years”. Because it is a continuing action, we often use the continuous form – “We’ve been going steady for three weeks now”; “I’ve been thinking about climate change”.

Action that is finished but within an ongoing context. This is as baffling as it sounds to non-natives but it comes automatically to us. For example, the present perfect is the tense you would normally use if you are reviewing your life in some way – “I’ve worked as a bus-driver and I’ve lived in Borneo and I’ve done a lot of acid”. However, as soon as the time of the action is specified, then the simple past tense must be used – “Yes, I have lived in Borneo. I worked there in 2009”.

There is actually a fourth use of the present perfect, as a storytelling tense, like the simple present. “Hear about Jim yesterday? Well, he’s run for the train, he’s got on the wrong one and he’s ended up in Birmingham.” Each of these events is clearly finished and in the past, specified as happening yesterday, so they would normally be dealt with in the simple past, but bringing them into the present perfect gives these completed, past actions a bit of live drama.

One regional variation in the form comes from Ireland, where the Gaelic-influenced “to be after” can be used instead with the continuous form – “I’m after sitting on a tomato”; “She’s after moving to Borneo”.

Simple past – I walked

Unlike the present perfect, this is a straightforward tense. The form is straightforward – regular verbs go into the simple past by adding an “ed” ending. The function is likewise straightforward – we use the simple past for events that are in the past and are finished. “I travelled to Birmingham yesterday”; “She worked as a bus driver then last year she retrained as an acrobat.”

The only unstraightforward feature of our simple past tense is that there are occasions when it has a non-past meaning – in an unreal present (“I wish it was sunny”; “if only you were here”) and even the future (“it’s high time I had my haircut”; “it’s time you went to bed”).

Past continuous – I was walking

This is formed in all dialects of English by using the past tense of “be” as an auxiliary (helping) verb and by giving the main verb the “ing” ending used for all our continuous tenses – “I was talking”, “she was working”, “they were windsurfing”.The only difference between working-class non-standards and the standard dialect is in that auxiliary, which in most non-standard versions is “was” or “were” throughout, where standard has “was” for the first person and third person in the singular and “were” for singular “you” and all plurals. Past continuous in standard:

I was talking We were talking
You were talking You were talking
He / she / it was talking They were talking


Befitting its name, the past continuous deals with actions which are finished, and which happened continuously before they ended – “I was living in Birmingham until I left for Borneo”. As in that example, the past continuous usually appears in a scene-setting or introductory way before an interrupting event, usually in the simple past – “he was making a cup of tea when an iceberg hit his house”; “it was raining so she put on her coat”.

Past perfect and past perfect continuous – I had walked, I had been walking

The past perfect is formed with “had” as the auxiliary verb and the past form of the main verb – “I had visited”, “you had talked”, “he, she or it had windsurfed”. We form the past perfect continuous by using “had been” as the auxiliary verbs together with the main verb plus an “ing” ending – “I had been visiting”, “you had been talking”, “he she or it had been windsurfing”.These tenses are used to place verbs further back in the past – “she had been windsurfing for an hour when she finally came out of the water”; “he had never even visited Birmingham before he moved there". As in those two examples, they often follow time-placing words like “after”, “before”, “when” or “until”. The continuous form requires a continuous action – we wouldn’t say, “he had never been visiting Birmingham”.

Future – I will walk

We put verbs into a future tense by using “will” or “[to be] going to” as an auxiliary verb and keeping the main verb in its stem form. This applies throughout – for I, you, she/he/it, we, you and they. “I will survive, you will go, it will rain, we will win, you will listen, they will windsurf”. However, traditionalists like to maintain the very old-fashioned distinction in ultra-standard, that “shall” applies in the first person, and “will” in the second and third, and that a “will” in the first or a “shall” in the second or third is used only for emphasis – “he shall be king!” “we will win”. (See Shall / will in Made-Up Rules)

In reality, “shall” is used as a future auxiliary only in standard and decreasingly so. The one time when it does turn up in many people’s speech is in suggestions – “shall I do the cooking?”; “shall I order a taxi?”, or even just “shall we?” There are other ways of forming a future construction. To give a sense of obligation, we can use the construction “to be” plus the infinitive (“to” plus the stem of the verb) – “he is to work in Borneo”; “you are to be held responsible”. The simple present can also refer to a future action, usually with a specified time – “we leave first thing tomorrow morning”; “the game starts at three”.

Future continuous – I will be walking

This is formed in all dialects with the auxiliaries “will be” plus the verb in its continuous “ing” form – “I’ll be watching you”; “she’ll be coming round the mountain”; “they’ll be dancing in the streets”. Although it’s used, obviously, for continuing actions, there’s also something neutral and matter-of-fact about the future continuous – “I will see you” is a little bit more forceful than “I will be seeing you”.

Future perfect and future perfect continuous – I will have walked, I will have been walking

To form the future perfect, we use “will have” then put the main verb into the past. The present perfect continuous uses “will have been” plus the “ing” form of the main verb. These two tenses allow us a sort of time-travel, projecting into a future to look back on an action that is yet to happen – “five past three? The match will have started by then”; “tomorrow, we will have been going steady for three weeks.” In African-American English, the future perfect can be formed with “be done” instead of “will have” – eg, “he be done gone by tomorrow”.

Present conditional and past conditional – I should walk, I could have walked

The present conditional is formed with “would”, “could” or “should” as the auxiliary verb and the stem of the main verb – “I should go, you could say that, he / she / it would be good”. The past conditional combines “would have”, “could have” or “should have” with the past form of the verb – “I should have travelled to Borneo”, “I could have been a contender”; “that would have been a terrible choice of swimwear”. To make a conditional construction, we usually combine a main statement with an “if” clause.

First conditional: the main statement goes into a future tense and the “if” clause stays in the present – “if she does it, I’ll do it”; “if you do that, they’ll go crazy”; “you’ll regret it if they go crazy”. This is used mainly for very confident predictions.

Second conditional: this is used for much less certain or completely theoretical speculations. It is formed by putting the verb in the “if” segment into the past and the verb in the main statement into a conditional with “would”, “could” or “should”. “If you knew her, you would like her”; “you could make it if you left now”; “she’d live in Birmingham if she had the chance”.

Third conditional: this is our most forlorn, regretful tense, used to describe things that did not happen but could or should have happened. To form the third conditional, we put the verb in the “if” segment into the past perfect and the verb in the main statement into the past conditional – “I would have tidied up if I had known you were coming”; “she would have cycled there if she’d had a bike”; “they’d have moved to Borneo if they had had the gumption”.

The third conditional is one of the last structures to be acquired by English-speaking children, who often put both parts into conditional form – “I would have gone if I would have known”. Thanks to the dismal state of our language teaching, this is a structure that many people mistakenly think must have an actually impossible preposition – “I could of done it”; “you should of seen her”; “they might of gone there”. (See Of - have in the Usage Guide).

Subjunctive

As in those examples, the past tense forms in the second and third conditionals are not referring to the past but to the unreal. Many of our neighbouring languages become quite complicated with unreal events, unleashing a whole series of tenses called subjunctives to deal with this non-reality. In English, for the most part, the subjunctive might as well not exist, or arguably does not exist, because in its past tense it takes the same form throughout as the simple past, and its present tense is almost invisible. The only time when the present subjunctive can be spotted in standard is in the third person singular, where the additional “s” is dropped – “God bless you” – and in most non-standards as well as standard in the verb “to be” which stays at “be” throughout the present – “God be with you”.

These are typically archaic phrases, where the subjunctive is a relic of a once-more popular structure. However, the steady decline of the subjunctive in British English, where it once looked like it would soon disappear, has been halted and reversed – the subjunctive has come back into use, thanks to its continuing currency in American English.

The past subjunctive has the same form as the simple past, except for “to be” which in standard has “were” throughout, so it is visible only in the first and third person singular – “if I were you”; “if she were here”; “if humans were to live on the Moon”. Just to muddy the waters, “was” can also be used here but with a shift in meaning, from the strictly theoretical of the subjunctive “were” to possibility – “the referee couldn’t see if the ball was over the line”.

Modal verbs

“Would” and “should” are the main auxiliary verbs for the conditional tenses but there are other “modal” verbs which can also be used – “can / could”, “may / might”, “have to / had to”, “must” and “ought”. These add extra meanings, about levels of possibility, permission and obligation. They have no continuous “ing” form, and they are noticeable in the present in standard English for not having an “s” ending for the third person singular. Neither “must” nor “ought” has a past form, so we have to use “had to” and “should” instead. Similarly, the lack of a future with “can” means we have to use the long-winded alternative, “will be able to” (except in some dialects, in Scotland and I think the US, which have double modals, and can allow a future tense – “We’ll can get there by evening”; “He’ll can pass if he works hard”.

Although even linguistics textbooks usually overlook the fact, “may” and “ought” are found only in the middle-class standard dialect – most non-standards use “might” and “should”.

“Need”, “dare” and “used to” are three “semi-modals”. “Need” and “dare” also operate as ordinary verbs but when they are working as modals, they behave modally, using the stem throughout, so noticeably “s”-less in standard in the third person singular – “he dare not go”, “she need not bother”. As modals, “need” and “dare” are almost always found in questions or negatives.

“Used to” is a popular construction which runs into a few difficulties when it isn’t positive because traditionalists maintain that we should drop the “d” in questions and negatives – “did she use to live there?” and “she did not use to”. Which is daft.

Auxiliary verbs

As well as its modals, English has three workhorses as auxiliary, helping verbs – “be”, “have” and “do”. Like “need” and “dare” they are also verbs in their own right but as auxiliaries, “be” is used for the continuous tenses, “have” for the perfect tenses and “do” is drafted in as an auxiliary verb in negatives and questions, which need auxiliaries in their structures, for the simple present and simple past. Present continuous: positive – “they are visiting”; negative – “they are not visiting”; question – “are they visiting?” Simple present: positive – “they visit”; negative – “they do not visit”; question – “do they visit?”

(If the main verb is “to be”, we can still use the old way of forming a negative in tenses with no auxiliaries, with “not” after the verb, and a question, with the old method of word-order reversal – “Is it safe? “It is not safe”.)

“Do” is also roped in as an auxiliary in “tag questions”, the little phrases that we add on to the end of a sentence: “I like custard, don’t I?”; “she travelled to Borneo, didn’t she?” If the main statement has a modal or an auxiliary, there’s no need for “do” – “she would, wouldn’t she?”; “I will, won’t I?” When there are two auxiliaries, it’s the first which is used for the tag question– “he should have done that, shouldn’t he?”

Tag questions are particularly popular in British English (standard and non-standard) whereas Americans tend to opt for phrases like “you know?” or “you know what I mean?” These tag questions are not really questions – they are there to ask for agreement or to soften the blow of a harsh statement or just to fill in a gap.

Meaningless they may be but they are very complicated to form: “You have visited Birmingham, haven’t you?” – (1) change polarity – positive statement takes negative tag (2) reverse word-order: “you have” to “have you”– (3) insert negative after auxiliary (4) use contracted form (“have not you?” isn’t possible) (5) replace nouns with pronouns – “those cars are fast, aren’t they?”

Complex and meaning-free, tag questions have been streamlined in the new London dialect, MLE, and all those complicated rules replaced by one catch-all term, “innit”. This new tag can be very obvious, especially when it does not follow an “is” – “you have visited Birmingham, innit”; “you’ll be there, innit” – and is widely mocked and scorned. There are no good linguistic reasons for this – the reason “innit” is mocked is because it is spoken by people who are young and working-class and who live in an inner city.

Negatives

I think questions are formed in the same way in all the varieties of English, but some dialects do have noticeably unstandard ways of handling shortened negatives. The most notorious is “ain’t” – used in many American and some southern English dialects where standard has “isn’t”, “aren’t”, “hasn’t” and “haven’t”. Some Scottish and very-northern-English dialects have their own negatives – “na” and “nae” – and their own contractions – “disnae”, “willnae” and “cannae” in Scotland, for example, “divvent” and “canna” in Northumberland. PASSWORD CONSTRUCTION

Irregular verbs [PASSWORDS]

So far, there has been little difference between the behaviour of verbs in the standard dialect and those in the non-standards – because so far the main verbs have been regular. Where middle-class standard and working-class non-standards diverge is in their formation of irregular verbs. The most irregular verb in all the dialects of English is standard’s “to be”. Here, the standard dialect is at its most unruly, with three forms of the verb in the simple present – “am”, “is” and “are” – where non-standard dialects often have only one:

Standard African-American English/rural west of England London (MLE)
I am I be I is
You are You be You is
It is It be It is
We are We be We is
They are They be They is
You are You all be Youse is
 

In the simple past, standard has “was” for the first and third person singulars, and “were” for the others – many non-standards have either “was” or “were” throughout. (Many dialects in southern England are levelling towards using “was” throughout as a positive and “weren’t” throughout in negatives.)

All the other irregular verbs become irregular in the past tenses. They are most irregular in middle-class standard, which often has two irregular past-tense forms where working-class non-standard dialects will usually have one, or occasionally a regularised version (“He blowed it”; “I seed it”). Almost all of these irregular verbs are among our most commonly used (because if an irregular word slips out of the core vocabulary, the weird form is gradually forgotten and replaced by a rule-obeying alternative. A fate that “smite” has somehow avoided.)

The two past-tense forms in English are for the simple past and the past participle, which is the form of the verb used in the tenses that go with “has / have” (“I have gone, you will have done, he might have forgotten”). In standard, the past participle is often the most irregular.

 

The twenty most common irregular verbs

Middle-Class Working-Class
simple past past participle simple past past participle
Be was + were been was or were been
Begin began begun begun begun
Break broke broken broke broke
Choose chose chosen chose chose
Come came come came came
Do did done done done
Drink drank drunk drunk drunk
Drive drove driven drove drove
Forget forgot forgotten forgot forgot
Give gave given gave gave
Go went gone went went
Mistake mistook mistaken mistook mistook
Ride rode ridden rode rode
Run ran run ran ran
See saw seen seen seen
Sing sang sung sang sang
Speak spoke spoken spoke spoke
Swear swore sworn swore swore
Take took taken took took
Write wrote written wrote wrote

A full list of the differences between the irregular verbs in middle-class standard and working-class dialects is given in the ebook, The Rules of English.

 

Passive

Most verbs are used in the active mood but most can also be turned into passives – when the subject and object swap roles, so that the done-to starts the statement, in which case the verb changes to a “be” auxiliary (helping) verb plus past participle:

Active Passive
The girl ate the ice-cream The ice-cream was eaten by the girl
Tourists will invade the town The town will be invaded by tourists
 

It is often thought rather coarse and common, but “get” can be used as an alternative to “be” – “all the ice-cream got eaten”; “the town will get invaded by tourists”.

All the “grammar” manuals are very down on the passive: always use an active verb, they all advise, for strong, forceful sentences. As a rule, yes, but the passive can be very useful – for example, when you can’t or don’t want to involve the subject – “the vase was broken”; “mistakes were made”. In fact, passives are to be recommended for scientific writing, or any other kind which requires an objective or impersonal voice.

 
Tense Active Passive
Simple present holds is held
Present continuous is holding is being held
Simple past held was held
Past continuous was holding was being held
Present perfect has held has been held
Past perfect had held had been held
Future will hold will be held
Future perfect will have held will have been held
Conditional would hold would be held
Past conditional would have held would have been held
Infinitive to hold to be held
Past infinitive to have held to have been held
Present participle/gerund holding being held
Past participle having held having been held
 

Several of the continuous tenses are missing from that column because they do not really have a passive. For example, it’s not really possible to form a passive version of the past perfect continuous – “he had been holding her bag” cannot swap their subjects and objects to give “her bag had been being held by him”.

Infinitives

We create infinitives by placing a “to” before the stem of the verb. The traditional “grammar” books have focused on that combination of “to” + verb, ordering that nothing should come between them. (See Made-Up Rules for the traditionalists’ ban of the split infinitive.) Meanwhile, unnoticed by the traditionalists, our infinitives have flourished, with six forms and lots of uses.

 
Present to enjoy
Present continuous to be enjoying
Perfect to have enjoyed
Perfect continuous to have been enjoying
Passive present to be enjoyed
Passive past to have been enjoyed
 

Our infinitives can work in various ways:

as subjects (“to err is human”)
paired with some adjectives (“ashamed to admit”, “happy to oblige”)
with “be” they can form a future (“we are to be there at three”; “I am to be transferred to the Birmingham branch”)
following some verbs (“I need to go”; “he meant to fall over”)
following some abstract nouns like “desire”, “offer”, “refusal”, and “wish” (“his request to go was denied”; “it was his decision to hold a referendum”)

Non-standard variations – It’s only one word but there are noticeably different infinitive forms in some non-standard dialects – in some contexts many have two words, “for to”, and Scottish and northeast-English dialects have “tae” instead of “to”. PASSWORD

Gerunds

Definition and form – They sound like they should be treated with a course of antibiotics but gerunds are actually verbs that have become nouns, and they are formed with an “ing” ending, like the present participle. “No smoking”; “his cooking is awful”; “but he’s really good at swimming” – these “ing” words can all be replaced by more conventional nouns (eg “exit, “conversation” and “music”).

English’s gerunds may have remained invisible to its native speakers but they are a very obvious and horrible part of our grammar for non-native learners – or at least non-native learners who have graduated to the advanced level, because there are times when our gerunds become head-spinningly complicated. (As far as I know, these rules apply throughout all the dialects of English, but there has been so little study of any non-standard grammar that has to be a vague assumption.) For a start, there are some verbs which have to be followed by a gerund. Most verbs link to second verbs with infinitives – “she wants to go”, “I fail to see”, “we’re going to try” – but a select group needs to be followed by the "ing" form of the gerund:

  • admit
  • anticipate
  • appreciate
  • avoid
  • consider
  • defer
  • delay
  • deny
  • detest
  • dislike
  • dread
  • enjoy
  • excuse
  • finish
  • forgive
  • imagine
  • involve
  • keep
  • loathe
  • mind
  • miss
  • pardon
  • postpone
  • practise
  • prevent
  • recall
  • resent
  • resist
  • risk
  • suggest
  • understand

Some of these verbs can also be followed by a “that” and then a normal verb form – “he denied that he was there”, “I suggested that they should go” – but none of them can be followed by an infinitive, only a gerund – “she denied going”; “he enjoyed talking”; “they kept doing it”. So the Portuguese football manager Jose Mourinho was making a real grammatical error when he said, “I enjoy to build a team”.

That's bad enough for non-English speakers to learn but the head-spinning begins with another group of verbs which can take either infinitives or gerunds, often with a slight change of meaning, sometimes more than slight:

  • advise
  • agree
  • allow
  • begin
  • cease
  • continue
  • forget
  • hate
  • intend
  • like
  • love
  • mean
  • need
  • permit
  • prefer
  • propose
  • recommend
  • regret
  • remember
  • require
  • start
  • stop
  • try
  • used to
    • want

Take “regret”, forget” and “remember”: if they are followed by another verb, and that verb stays in its usual infinitive form, then that means the second verb’s action follows the regretting, forgetting or remembering. If that second verb becomes a gerund by adding an “ing”, then its action precedes the regretting, forgetting or remembering.

No? Yet you can tell the difference immediately between “I regret to tell you” and “I regret telling you”. Or between “I’ve forgotten to buy you a present” versus “I’ve forgotten buying you a present” – in the first structure with the infinitive, there was no present; in the second, with the gerund “ing” form, there is. “I remembered to feed the cat” – first I remembered, then I did the feeding. “I remembered feeding the cat” – first I fed the cat, then I remembered doing so.

Or take “stop”. Followed by a gerund, the action of that gerund comes to a halt – “they stopped talking”. Followed by an infinitive, one action is halted to start another – “they stopped to talk”. Here’s Jose Mourinho getting his gerunds wrong again, in a moan about “the attacking players stopping to play”; no, they “stopped playing”, otherwise they were doing something entirely different and quit that in order to play.

One of the subtler shifts in meaning happens with “like” – if it’s in a conditional tense, “like” is followed by an infinitive – “I would like to go” – unless the action being liked is being considered in the abstract or in general – “I’d like cycling if it was safe”. In the other, non-conditional tenses, “like” plus infinitive indicates something that is beneficial: “like” plus gerund means enjoyment. Hence, “I like to run five miles every day but I don’t actually like running”; “I like to pay my tax monthly but I hate paying it”; “I like to go to the doctor for a check-up ever year”. It’d be quite difficult to say “I like to smoke sixty a day” or “I liked visiting him in the hospice”. “I like to eat five portions of veg a day” – because you’re keeping to health guidelines. “I like eating five portions of veg a day” – you’re saying you’re doing the five-a-day and enjoying the taste of the vegetables.

 

Prepositions

Definition

Prepositions are the usually short words that locate nouns, usually in space, often in time, also often metaphorically – “It’s been there on the carpet, under the sofa, for months, and I’m beyond caring.”

Use

We don’t have many prepositions – about a hundred – but we use them a lot. Of the top six most commonly used words in English, three are prepositions:

  • the (determiner)
  • of (preposition)
  • and (conjunction)
  • to (preposition)
  • a (determiner)
  • in (preposition)

We use prepositions so much because we’ve had to draft them in to do the work that different endings perform in inflected languages like Latin, and used to perform in our ancestral Old English.

Top ten most used prepositions: of to in for with on as by at from

Why English's prepositions are devilishly difficult for non-natives

Our prepositions seem to be simple and straightforward – they don’t move about, and they don’t change form, as they do in many other languages. Nonetheless, it’s with our prepositions that the grammar of English gets impossibly difficult for foreign learners. Hungarian has its forty-two endings for each verb, Basque has its potentially infinite number of different noun endings – and English has its prepositions.The complications all happen because we like to combine our prepositions with other words in very particular ways. Adjectives require specific prepositions – proud + of, happy + about, happy + for, happy + with . . . So do some verbs – “Do you believe in life after love?” sings Cher; “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” sang Bing; “I’m waiting for my man,” says Lou Reed. We English speakers talk about stuff when we speak to each other, we all come from somewhere and live in our current place and hope for a better tomorrow . . . All of these countless verb + preposition pairings are unproblematically obvious to us but only us. For adult learners of English as a foreign language, they have to be learned, one by one.

This brings us to the most unlearnable part of English grammar – our phrasal verbs. You will probably not have heard of them but non-native-speakers certainly have and they try their very best to have nothing to do with them. Unfortunately for them, we natives use phrasal verbs a lot and there are a lot of them – about 6,000, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs, which has to be by a distance the least-enjoyed dictionary on the EFL market.

A phrasal verb is the result of a verb combining with one preposition, sometimes two, to work together as a new verb. This new verb will have its own, often completely unpredictable meaning, and sometimes not just one unpredictable meaning but several, and sometimes more than several. Take “make” + “up” – that can mean to decide (“I’ve made up my mind”), to lie or invent (“no, you’re making that up”), to apply cosmetics (“she’s really made herself up”), to consist (“the congregation is made up of pensioners”), to mix or assemble (“the pharmacist made up the prescription”) and to be reconciled (“we kissed and made up”). And “make” can go with so many other prepositions with so many other specific meanings. “She made over the house but you can still make out the stains, so she made out it was accidental, made away with the profits and made for Spain.”

Standard and non-standard prepositions

I’m not sure about non-standard prepositions because there has been so little study of them. I’m guessing that there are only a few differences between middle-class standard’s and those of the working-class non-standard dialects, but that any would be very noticeable, and not positively.

 

Adverbs

Definition

They seem simple enough from the usual definition – adverbs describe verbs. So adverbs are to verbs what adjectives are to nouns. And you know it’s an adverb by the “ly” ending – “he drives slowly”, “she writes badly”, “they ran quickly”. There you go – definition and form, the end. Sadly, no.

Let’s take the definition first. Yes, the core of the adverb category is made up of words that describe verbs, but it’s not just verbs that adverbs go with, it’s every possible category apart from nouns – adjectives (“he’s a hopelessly slow driver”), other adverbs (“she plays really beautifully”), determiners (“ I have nearly no friends”), prepositional phrases (“it went on nearly to the end”) and sometimes even noun phrases (“nearly a nasty accident”). Plus there are the sentence-starters which apply to whole statements and even entire arguments – like “however”, “besides” and “also”, as well as the “ly”-ending ones like “fortunately” or “luckily” or poor, much-maligned “hopefully” (see Made-Up Rules). Some words can be both adverbs and nouns – “tomorrow” is a noun in James Bond’s Tomorrow Never Dies, but in Annie’s “the sun will come out tomorrow” it’s an adverb. As is Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”, which introduces a noun-phrase, “all my troubles”, and could be replaced by another more obviously adverbial adverb like “formerly” or “recently” with no loss of grammaticality, though possibly some of effect. Some words which are usually categorised as prepositions – “in” and “out” and “up” and “down” – can find themselves in an adverbial role (“he has gone up in the world so he looks down on them”).

Far from being simple, the Adverbs category is traditional English grammar’s cupboard under the stair, somewhere to shove those useful items that don’t seem to fit in anywhere else. I’ve kept to the conventional classification, although the Cambridge Grammar offers a more sophisticated version with many adverbs reassigned as prepositions.

Form

Adverbs have a “ly” ending – well, yes, some do, but only in standard, the only dialect of any Germanic language which uses a special suffix for adverbs. Or rather for some adverbs – even in standard there are lots of “ly”-less adverbs, including one of the most important, “very”. “Often”, “then”, “always”, “far”, “sometimes” – they don’t sound like adverbs but they are: “I never walk south but always travel there by gondola, which goes pretty straight” – in each case you could replace the unadverby-sounding word with one ending in “ly” – “I rarely walk _slowly_but usually travel luxuriously by gondola, which goes really quickly”.

Those adverbs which do have a “ly” ending in middle-class standard have become important passwords. “He spoke slow”; “You got here quick”; “I’ll do it real careful” – in speaking as well as writing, the ly-less adverbs of working-class non-standard dialects can stand out, when they’ll be seen as mistakes. PASSWORD CONSTRUCTION

It’s not an easy rule for non-standard speakers to apply, because there are so many adverbs in standard which don’t take an -ly ending: fortunate + ly = yes; straight + ly = no; fast + ly = no; quick + ly = yes, careful + ly = yes; left + ly = no, etc, etc.

This website lists the most common adverbs that do take an "ly" ending in standard - www.vocabulary.com/lists/156570; www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-common-English-ly-adverbs. This site gives a list of 500 adverbs that don’t have an -ly ending – www.wordexample.com/list/adverbs-not-ending-ly.

A drawback of middle-class standard’s system is that it can’t cope with adjectives which already end in “ly” – “early”, “lonely”, “likely”, “cowardly”, “fatherly”, “womanly” etc. If you want to use, say, “friendly” as an adverb in standard, you have to go round the houses – “he waved at us in an ungainly but friendly kind of way” – since “ungainlyly” and “friendlyly” aren’t really on.

Comparatives and superlatives

Like adjectives, some adverbs can be graded, with comparative and superlative forms, using “more” and “most” respectively – in standard, “they walked more quickly”; in non-standard, “they played most beautiful”. A very few, one-syllabled adverbs, like “fast” and “hard”, plus “early”, can dispense with the “more” and “most” and change form themselves, adding an “-er” for comparatives and “-est” for superlatives. Traditional grammars say that, as with adjectives, it’s wrong to combine the two forms – “the horse ran the most fastest” is, to them, a ghastly error. The reality is that people do use both at the same time for emphasis. The traditionalists also like to ban any comparatives or superlatives going with adverbs of the adjectives which they think are ungradable – “very perfectly”, “most completely” etc. (See Made-Up Rules)

Placement

One problem non-native-speakers have with their adverbs is where to put them – “he speaks quickly English”; “they ate reluctantly the haggis”. But when we native speakers have to think about it, as we sometimes have to do in writing, placing an adverb can be tricky for us as well. “Fortunately, we have increased exports by …. We have fortunately increased. . . We have increased exports, fortunately, by …” Which is best? Is any of them wrong? Where should that “fortunately” go? Often, the answer, as with that “fortunately”, is that there are various places the adverb can go, all of them sounding okay because our adverbs can move around a lot with no change in meaning or even much of a shift of nuance. “I usually drink red wine. I drink red wine usually. Usually, I drink red wine.” “Unfortunately, we’ve run out of red. We’ve run out of red, unfortunately. We’ve unfortunately run out of red. We’ve run out, unfortunately, of red.” (Okay, okay . . . got any white?)

However, adding a strong dose of paranoia to what could have been the carefree, prancing idyll of adverb placement is the snag that there are times in formal, written English when the positioning of the adverb is crucial, with possibly melodramatic changes of meaning. Hence the differences between “honestly, I didn’t do it” and “I didn’t do it honestly”, “foolishly, I did it” versus “I did it foolishly”, and “naturally, I cured the salmon” and “I cured the salmon naturally”.

It’s a problem that usually occurs with words like “only” or “mostly” or “just” – in written as well as spoken English, these can and do appear in various positions because the meaning will be clear from the context, but the traditional grammarians stipulate that such an adverb must come immediately before the word it’s meant to go with. Hence the important difference between the slightly cynical “he only flirted with her” and the rather romantic “he flirted only with her”.

 

Conjunctions

Definition

Conjunctions are joining words, like “and”, “but” and “because”. There are two types of conjunction – coordinating and subordinating.

Coordinating conjunctions

Coordinating conjunctions can join two or more individual words of the same word-class – “Tom and Jerry”, “he sat quietly and sensibly”; “my hobbies are cooking and smoking”. They can also join main statements in a sentence – “It was a hot day and the boy wanted an ice-cream”; “I kicked the ball and the window got broken”.

There are seven coordinating conjunctions in English – the main one, “and”, plus “but”, “for”, “nor”, “or”, “so” and “yet”.

Subordinating conjunctions

Single words:
  • after
  • although
  • as
  • at
  • because
  • before
  • beside(s)
  • between
  • by
  • despite
  • if
  • since
  • so
  • than
  • that
  • though
  • unless
  • until
  • when
  • where
  • while
  • with
  • without
Phrases:
  • as if / though
  • as long/soon/much as
  • as well as
  • because of
  • due to
  • even if / though
  • in accordance with
  • in addition to
  • in case
  • in order that / to
  • in spite of
  • instead of
  • on account of
  • only if
  • owing to
  • provided that
  • so that

Although some subordinating conjunctions can join individual words (“this instead of that”, “postponed due to frost”), most can’t because their main function is to join different phrases in a sentence. The phrases they introduce are not main statements but subordinate ones – ie, dependent on the main – “the boy ate an ice-cream, even though the wind was Baltic”; “I’d love to, provided that you don’t smoke while you cook”.

Conjunctions in non-standard English

As far as I can tell, conjunctions have the same forms, functions and meanings in all dialects of English – but there has been almost no study of them, so the truth is that nobody knows.

Alternative explanation of conjunctions

I have kept to a traditional version of our conjunctions because it is relatively familiar and because it keeps things simple. However, it is also out-of-date, having been replaced by the more considered and accurate explanation in the Cambridge Grammar, which deletes “conjunctions” as a word-class and offers instead two distinct grammatical categories – coordinators and subordinators. Both categories have tiny memberships, of only three items:

Coordinators – and, but, or. Subordinators – that, whether, if

Coordinators link elements that are grammatically the same – for example, nouns (“boys and girls”, “War and Peace”) and adjectives (“red or green”, “clever but silly”). The equality principle extends to similarly structured clauses – “he threw the kettle and it hit him”; “his usual is drinking nine pints and acting the eedjit”; “of course it was good news or I wouldn’t have told them”.

Subordinators – by this account, only “that”, “whether” and “if” can be said to be grammatical markers of subordination – ie, introduce a subordinate clause. All the other “subordinating conjunctions” of the traditional version, like “before” or “because”, have meaning and are treated as “heads” of the phrases they introduce, so they have been recategorised as prepositions.

Harry Ritchie
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