21st Century Grammar Handbook (27 page)

The prepositional phrase can function adjectivally or adverbially, following the
rules
for each such role as if it were a single word
adverb
or
adjective.
See the entry on
prepositions
for more information on
punctuation, order of words,
and other aspects of using prepositions and the words they govern; see also
modifier.

Present tense.
Verbs
change their forms to indicate the time of the actions or conditions they depict. Actions or conditions that take place now or are perceived by the writer or speaker to be happening now are in the “present tense.”

Verbs form their present tenses from the main form itself (in the first and second person) and the main form plus “S” or “es” (in the third person) in most cases: “walk, walks” “type, types” “echo, echoes.” See
tenses
for more elaborately formed and commonly used forms of the present tense.

Principal, principle.
Do not confuse these words that sound alike
(homonyms).
“Principal” means mean or
primary as either an
adjective
or
noun:
“‘The principal means of attaining success is hard work,’ said the school principal [main official].” In financial terms, “principal” is the main body of money in an investment. “Principle” means rule or belief: “The main principles of Buddhism are not commonly known in this country.”

Principle.
See
principal.

Proceed.
See
precede.

Pronoun.
Words that “stand for” more specific
nouns
are called “pronouns.” The common pronouns come in many types:
personal pronouns, demonstrative, intensifiers, interrogative, reciprocal pronouns, reflexive pronouns,
and
relative pronouns.
There are entries for each of the important pronouns and for each of these types. Please consult those specific entries as well as the brief description of their functioning given below along with a list of the most common pronouns in each group.

PERSONAL
. Personal pronouns are used in place of specific things or people. I,
you, he, she, it, we,
and they are all the personal pronouns.

DEMONSTRATIVE
. These pronouns that indicate specific things or people and suggest their relationship to the speaker: this, these and
that,
those are the singulars and
plurals
of the demonstratives that suggest, respectively, closeness or immediacy versus remoteness.

INTENSIVE
. Pronouns that add
“self”
(“selves” in plural) can be used to emphasize the nouns they precede (“I myself saw that.”). These forms are also reflexive pronouns. See
emphasis.

INTERROGATIVE
. These pronouns indicate questioning: what, which, and
who.

RECIPROCAL
. These pronouns, “each other” and “one another,” are used with plural
antecedents
to indicate separate actions or conditions of the antecedent: “I saw the monkeys groom each other.”

REFLEXIVE
. Reflexives are formed like the intensive pronouns by adding “self” or “selves” (plural). These words stand alone (unlike the intensive) and indicate actions or conditions that go back to the sentence or clause
subject:
“The monkey groomed itself and its mate.”

RELATIVE
. These pronouns
(“that”
“what,” “whatever,” “which,” “whichever,” “who,” and “whoever”) link dependent
clauses
to the main parts of
sentences
and indicate the relationship between such clauses and the sentence’s main thrust: “I saw the monkey that was grooming its partner, who was sitting nearby.” See also
restrictive clauses
and
nonrestrictive clauses.

Proper noun.
In
grammar
terms,
names
are “proper nouns”: “Bill told Marie that the
Titanic
had sunk with his copy of Tolstoy’s novel.” All the capitalized words in the
example are proper nouns, or names of things or people (see
capitalization).
Proper nouns are almost always capitalized.

Prove, proved, proved.
An
irregular verb
in its main,
past tense,
and past
participle
forms.

Proved.
See
prove.

Punctuation.
The marks in sentences that are not letters are “punctuation.” Punctuation marks tell how various parts of the sentence are related to one another and to other sentences. Each of the punctuation marks listed and briefly described here has an entry of its own giving further details about it and examples of how to use it.

ACCENTS
. These marks appear above or below letters to indicate their pronunciation or other aspects of their function within a word. English has no
accents
in words that originated in the language itself, but it shows accents carried over from other languages: “The employee wrote a
résumé.” “Résumé”
is an English word now, and it usually carries the accents that it had in its French origins.

APOSTROPHE.
Apostrophes
(’) mark
possessives
and
contractions:
“The player’s dog doesn’t bite.”

ASTERISK
. The
asterisk
(*) is more a typographical device to emphasize parts of
lists,
notes to a page, and the like rather than a punctuation mark strictly speaking: “Here are the important points:

• *punctuality
  

• *neatness …”
  

COLON
. The
colon
(:) stands before and sharply sets off lists and dependent or independent
phrases
or
clauses.
It appears in this book frequently before examples: “The important parts are as follows: punctuality, neatness, …”The colon also appears in time figures to separate hours and minutes: “See you at 2:45.”

COMMA
. The
comma
(,) separates elements without much abruptness or distance; put another way, commas link things as much as they separate them and mark borders between things: “The photojournalist photographed lions, cheetahs, and elephants. The photographer took the photos in Africa, and developed them in Indiana, where the studio is.” The commas in the example link and mark borders between items in a list and then between two independent clauses, one of which has within it nouns in
apposition
(rephrased versions of the
nouns
next to which they stand) to the
object
of a
preposition.
Many other grammatical entities are similarly linked and delimited by commas.

Commas also appear in
numbers
greater than 999 that aren’t dates (“4,367”), in
dates
between days and years (“November 23, 1963”), and to set off honorific
titles
and direct
quotations
(“Jan Smith, Ph.D., said, That’s right.”).

DASH
. The
dash
(—) is an abrupt or sharp divider of ideas or words that usually sets off something added or interjected
into a sentence: “Everyone there—Bill, Mary, Inga—agreed.” See
interjection.

ELLIPSIS
. This punctuation mark (…) indicates the omission of some words (three periods) or
sentences
(four periods) from quoted speech or from any incomplete statement whether attributed to someone or not: “The speaker said, ‘The points to consider are sixteen in number: first….” “I decided that enough was enough….”

EXCLAMATION POINT
. The
exclamation point
marks an emphatic, loud, or important statement: “You better believe it!” See
emphasis.

HYPHEN
. The
hyphen
(-) joins two words together to form a
compound word:
“The decision-making process took too long.” The hyphen also indicates that a word fragment at the end of a line should be joined to the rest of the word that appears at the beginning of the next line:

PARENTHESES
. Interjected words in a sentence can be marked in several ways, including by enclosure in
parentheses:
“Everyone there (Chris, Jan, Sandy) agreed.” Commas or dashes can often be used for the same purpose.

PERIOD
. The period (.) marks the end of sentences that don’t end with question marks or exclamation points: “That is
so.” Periods also indicate the ends of
abbreviations:
“Mr. Jones is here.”

QUESTION MARK
. This punctuation ends a
question:
“Isn’t that so?”

QUOTATION MARKS
. This punctuation surrounds a direct quote: “King said, ‘I have a dream.’ ” Single quotes appear to mark direct quotes within quoted speech, as in the example.
Quotation marks
around single words or phrases are also used to indicate that they are somehow in question or are being considered as entities or grammatical categories in themselves: “‘Dream’ is a noun.”

SEMICOLON
. The
semicolon
(;) functions somewhat like the comma, but it is used to mark clearer distinctions between or among things or when the phrases or clauses it separates already contain commas: “We saw lions, tigers, and rhinos; and then we left the zoo and went to the movies.”

Put, put, put.
An
irregular verb
in its main,
past tense,
and past
participle
forms.

Qualifier.
See
modifier, adjective,
and
adverb.

Question.
Sentences or sentence
fragments
can ask questions either directly or indirectly.
Punctuation
and
order of words
vary, depending on the type of question.

Sentences
that are wholly devoted to questioning or asking something are called “direct questions”: “What is that?” “Is it the thing you said you would bring?” “Is it as heavy as it looked when we first considered buying it and bringing it here?” “Expensive?” Each of these questions is a direct question, even the last sentence
fragment
and the longer sentences that convey information as well as asking for more. The writer has indicated the directness of the questions in several ways typical of such sentences.

First, like all direct questions, the example sentences end in
question marks
(?). Second, like many direct questions, some of these sentences invert word order. Commonly the
inversion
puts an
auxiliary
verb at the beginning of the sentence
(“is” “do,”
and the like) and follows it with a
pronoun
of some sort
(“it”
in the examples, though many others are used). The next word is often a
noun,
which can be seen as a shifted
subject
or a
subject complement
more or less normally placed. Other words that frequently start such
sentences are
interrogative
pronouns (“what,” “which,” and
“who”),
as in the first example sentence.

Word order can be more elaborately changed, and other words can start questions (“how,” “why,” and so on). But the main features are clear: inversion, questioning word to start, and question mark to end. As with all inversions, those used for questions should be checked carefully to ensure
agreement
among all grammatical elements—movement of elements for question order can put subjects far from
verbs, objects,
or subject complements. Make sure all is in order.

The most common agreement errors occur with the interrogative pronoun “who” as the first word in a question: Should it be “who”
(nominative
case) or “whom”
(objective case)
when it hangs out there at the start? How can one tell? The simplest test of
case
in such sentences is to answer the question with a pronoun that changes form in its objective case: “Who is to be asked? She is to be asked.” “Her” is obviously wrong here since it is not an object but the subject of a
passive
construction. “Whom did you see? I saw him.” Clearly you see something or someone in an
active
sentence as its object, and therefore the objective “whom” is correct.

Besides their obvious function of asking for information, questions can play an emphasizing role by varying sentence structure and thus calling attention to something. In this function questions are often used rhetorically, to make a statement rather than request enlightenment: “Is our cause not just?” The writer has no desire to hear a response to this “question.”
Rhetorical questions
thus often lead
paragraphs
or longer portions of a document in order to establish a topic or idea in an emphatic way: “Isn’t it curious how the caterpillar lives?” Again, no answer is expected, but our attention is focused on caterpillars and their evidently unusual patterns of life. See
emphasis.

The device of rhetorical questioning to open a statement,
paragraph,
or whatever is somewhat clichéd—a bit tired and overused. Thus its emphatic force has been lost to some degree, and it is often seen as an obvious, mechanical, or awkward way to launch a subject. Certainly rhetorical questions, like all emphatic devices, should not be repeated frequently in the same document, paragraph, or statement. Remember that the question you did not intend anyone to answer might be responded to: “No, caterpillars aren’t curious in the least.” The reader or listener has now been lost. See
cliché.

When questions are restated or reported within other
sentences,
they are “indirect questions”: “The interviewer asked what interests you.” These questions do not end in question marks and usually do not vary or invert word order since they are not emphasizing anything or marking themselves as questions. Indirect questions usually include
verbs
that suggest they are reporting a question: “ask,” “question,” “inquire,” and so on. Indirect questions are identical to other sentences in all other respects. See
emphasis
and
order of words.