English language worksheet I PARTS OF SPEECH, Exercises of English Language

Download English language worksheet I PARTS OF SPEECH and more Exercises English Language in PDF only on Docsity! English language worksheet I PARTS OF SPEECH by Sarah Williams “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or is the soul greater than the hum of its parts?1” This worksheet is the first in our series and shows you what parts of speech do in a simple English sentence. Do this worksheet first if you know little or nothing about English grammar, or if you want to do one of our more complex grammar worksheets later on. Introductory notes Parts of speech are different types of word: noun, verb, adjective etc. In this worksheet, you learn the parts of speech needed to make a straightforward English sentence. Working through the whole sheet, doing all the exercises, will take approximately 90 minutes. There’s also a revision section at the end, with another 30 minutes’ work. A references section points you to more resources to learn about grammar. Because we have had to give you some illustrative examples of non-standard or incorrect English, we have marked these with an * sign. You will need to print off the worksheet to do the exercises. Space is provided to write, and a key to the exercises is given at the end. This worksheet is quite a long one, as it covers a lot of ground: you may want to look through it first and just print the sections you need. Our theme is the history of Big Ben, and the British Houses of Parliament. We have freely used and adapted text from Wikipedia, a source we would normally advise against for academic purposes. For the purposes of the worksheet, however, this is an easily available and adaptable text. Section 1: how do we name the parts of a sentence? Here’s a short sentence describing some of the history of the British parliament: The reigning monarch opened formally the Palace of Westminster in 1852. This sentence contains the following speech parts: Abstract noun Proper noun Concrete noun (2) Adjective (2) Article (2) Adverb Verb (in the past tense) Preposition (2) Before we work on what these terms mean, have a go at seeing what you know already. Here’s the same sentence separated into words. Write the terms next to the words. Exercise 1.1 – naming parts of speech The Palace reigning of monarch Westminster opened in formally 1852. the Check your answer on page 12 (all answers are at the end of the worksheet). Now let’s look at individual parts of speech. 1 After Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas R. Hofstadter (1982),The Mind’s I Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 2 Section 2: what is a noun? A noun can be: a thing, a place, a person, a name, or an idea: e.g. monarch, palace, Westminster, and democracy are all examples of nouns. Proper nouns are mainly names of locations and people and are capitalised in English: London Augustus Pugin Queen Victoria Improper nouns are generic things and are not capitalised: monarch parliament clock university intelligence Improper nouns can be concrete or abstract. Concrete nouns are visible things: computer telephone car Gordon Brown Abstract nouns are generally ideas, or concepts: intelligence success elation Darwinism Both proper and improper nouns can be either abstract or concrete.  CAREFUL! Unnecessarily capitalising improper nouns because they ‘feel important’ is a common written error: *Cardiff is the biggest City in Wales. *It contains three Universities. City and universities should not be capitalised here as they are not proper nouns. However, in the next example, city forms part of a proper noun and should have a capital: Vatican City is the smallest country in the world. Groups of words acting like a noun e.g. Palace of Westminster, University of Wales Institute Cardiff, are known as phrasal nouns. These are often also proper nouns. Nouns can be singular shoe library person billboard or plural shoes libraries people billboards Most plural nouns end in ‘s’ – regular plurals – but there can be minor spelling changes and exceptions: story  stories storey  storeys sheaf  sheaves The y  ies change is the most common. Some frequently-used nouns have different plural forms known as irregular plurals: child  children person  people fruit  fruit There are, unfortunately, many exceptions e.g. you can say “Fruits of the forest” meaning varieties of fruit. American English also has differences of use e.g. people at work can be called “staffs” not “staff” as in British English. Some dialects of non-standard English tend to drop plurals e.g. “*It cost twenty pound” is quite common, and while it is fine in casual spoken English, it should be avoided in formal written English. Settling these issues, however, is beyond the scope of this worksheet. In the next exercise, circle the nouns in this text. Try to identify the types of noun. Answers are on page 12. Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 5 Rewrite these two sentences as one sentence; try to avoid repeating the various forms of stone. Exercise 4.2 – using pronouns to avoid repetition The stonework of the building was originally Anston, a sand-coloured magnesian limestone quarried in the village of Anston in South Yorkshire. The stone, however, soon began to decay due to pollution and the poor quality of some of the stone used. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 5: what is an adjective? In our original sentence, we identified just one adjective: The reigning monarch opened formally the Palace of Westminster in 1852. In English, adjectives usually precede nouns, except in rare cases for literary effect. You can see that “reigning” could also be a verb and, in fact, almost any word in English can act as an adjective e.g. the already mentioned “clock tower” where clock is the adjective before the noun, tower. Before a noun, you can add several adjectives, often separated by commas: The young, quick, brown fox jumped over the old, lazy dog. It is too easy in English to pile on the adjectives (and adverbs) instead of choosing illustrative nouns and powerful verbs. We have a lot to say about this on our worksheets on style and sentence structure, but for now let’s content ourselves with two exercises on identifying and choosing adjectives. In the familiar text, circle the adjectives (you should find over ten, including some compound adjectives). Exercise 5.1 – finding adjectives Big Ben has become a symbol of the United Kingdom and London, particularly in the visual media. When a television or film maker wishes to indicate a generic location in Britain, a popular way to do so is to show an image of the clock tower, often with a red double-decker bus or black cab in the foreground. Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning to its chimes to welcome the start of the year. Here is another short piece of information about Big Ben. Add just three more adjectives to liven it up. Exercise 5.2 – finding adjectives Big Ben really does chime thirteen. If you live in London within earshot of the clock, open your window at midnight and turn on your radio. Because of the delay in the broadcast, the twelfth chime on your radio will sound after the chime on the clock. No key here; it’s up to you. Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 6 Section 6: what is a verb? Welcome to the easiest part of this worksheet! Here’s a very, very useful rule about verbs: No sentence in formal, academic English is complete without a verb. In some literary English, verbless (and even subjectless) sentences are used by some writers for effect, but do not use these in formal essays, assignments, or even more personalised forms of reflective writing. We identified the verb in our first example sentence as “opened”: The reigning monarch opened formally the new Palace of Westminster in 1852. Take a look at a similar sentence: The reigning monarch formally opens parliament every autumn. In the first sentence, the past form of open describes what the British reigning monarch in 1852 (Queen Victoria) did. In the second sentence, the present form of open describes what every reigning monarch does every year. At the moment that’s the current queen, Elizabeth II, but it could later refer to her successor or to her father King George VI. Here is another version: The reigning monarch is opening parliament formally. This form of the verb – the present continuous – means Queen Elizabeth is in Parliament, right now, giving her speech. Don’t worry about “formally” (the adverb) moving about: this is covered in the next section. These different forms of verbs are known as tenses, a topic we cover extensively in our worksheets on sentence fragments and sentence structure. As you can see, using different tenses radically changes meaning, but don’t worry about that for the moment: let’s just focus on recognising verbs. Here are two final examples: The reigning monarch must open parliament formally. The reigning monarch has opened parliament formally. Other words have now appeared before the verb. Putting “must”, a modal verb, in front of open, means the present monarch is obliged to open parliament, as a duty. “Has” combined with opened creates a tense called the present perfect, which is often used to describe recently completed actions. Many verbs or verb forms in English are made like this, with modal auxiliary verbs or particles added. For the moment, don’t worry about identifying tenses. Let’s return to one of our earlier texts. This time, go though it and circle anything you think is a verb or a verb form. If you are not sure of the words attached to the verb, just circle the main verb itself. Exercise 6.1 – finding verbs Big Ben has become a symbol of the United Kingdom and London, particularly in the visual media. When a television or film-maker wishes to indicate a generic location in Britain, a popular way to do so is to show an image of the clock tower, often with a red double-decker bus or black cab in the foreground. Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning to its chimes to welcome the start of the year. If you want to explore further using verbs, try Richard Palmer’s The Good Grammar Guide. It has plenty of exercises, including some on the parts of speech we are looking at. It’s a Cardiff Met library e-book so you can easily download and print off just the pages you need. Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 7 7. What is an adverb? Now you understand the concept of an adjective describing a noun, adverbs are easy: their main function is to describe verbs: The hare ran quickly and the tortoise waddled slowly. The reigning monarch formally opened the Palace of Westminster in 1852. Both examples are interesting examples of redundancy: the three adverbs contribute little to their sentences. The comparative speed of tortoises and hares is common knowledge, and it is pretty hard to imagine Queen Victoria doing anything informally. If you want to edit the flab out of writing, adverbs are a good first candidate for the bin. Like adjectives, they are very easy to add on thoughtlessly , and are too easy to make: most of them are just adjectives with –ly on the end. Watch out for the exceptions, and the temptations of ‘cool’, but non-standard English. It’s all very well for Andy Murray to produce “*I played good” in a triumphant post-match interview, but the tennis correspondent should be writing “He played well” in The Daily Telegraph. Placement of adverbs is also a contentious issue. The general rule is that they follow the verb, but notice that in the second sentence above, the adverb is before the verb. Our example about Queen Victoria could be written several ways: The reigning monarch formally opened the Palace of Westminster in 1852. The reigning monarch opened formally the Palace of Westminster in 1852. The reigning monarch opened the Palace of Westminster in 1852, formally. The reigning monarch opened the Palace of Westminster formally in 1852. Placing adverbs is partly about where they are most comfortable in the sentence. The second and third examples above feel awkward, but are not wrong. But, what about this well known ‘mission’ statement? To boldly go where no man has gone before2. This commits what many traditional grammarians see as the cardinal sin of ‘splitting the infinitive’ (an infinitive structure is ‘to’ plus the root verb e.g. to go, to eat) where an adverb comes between “to” and the verb. There’s even a whole website (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/385400.html) devoted to this famous example. We recommend avoiding splitting the infinitive, but this is a minor issue. Concentrate on the important bigger picture. Circle the adverbs in this passage about damage to Big Ben. Careful: there are some words which look like adverbs, but do not act like them. See if you can find the one split infinitive too. Exercise 7.1 – finding adverbs From 1939, the chimes rang on the quarter hours continuously, but the clock face was darkened at night to prevent attack by the heavily armed Zeppelins. Though the clock functioned perfectly during the war and up to 1962, heavy snow and ice that New Year’s Eve caused the pendulum to abruptly detach from the clockwork to avoid damaging seriously the sensitively-tuned mechanism. The 1963 New Year was ten minutes late. Not often silent, the Great Clock shut down for 26 separate days in 1976 and 1977 due to ‘torsional fatigue’; however popular myth has it that the clock got fed up with the exceptionally hot summer of 1976 and gave itself a holiday too. May 2005 briefly saw a shut-down, also attributable to hot weather. 2 This is one of the spoken opening titles in the Star Trek TV series. Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 1 0 Section 9: revision exercises Do the first exercise again, labelling the various words in the sentence, and see how well you do this time. Exercise 9.1 – naming parts of speech The Palace reigning of monarch Westminster opened in formally 1852. the Here are two exercise texts about the great bell and chimes of Big Ben, practising what you have learned. This text about the great bell of Big Ben contains 20 errors or ambiguities. Correct them, and try to identify the misunderstandings about parts of speech which may have caused the problems. Exercise 9.2 – the Great Bell A main bell, officially known as the Great Bell, is the largest Bell in the tower and part of the Great Clock of Westminster. The bell is better known from the nickname Big Ben. The originally bell was a 16.3-tonne (16 ton) hour bell, cast on 6th August 1856 in Stockton-on-Tees by John Warner & Sons. To accurately pinpoint the origin of the name is difficult, but it could of been named after a contemporary heavy weight boxer, Benjamin Caunt. The first bell was transported to the tower on trolley drawn by sixteen horse, with crowds cheering its progress. Unfortunately, it cracked beyond repair while being tested and a replacement had to be made. This was pulled slowly up the two hundred foot belfry, a feat that took 18 hours. This new 2.2 metres tall and 2.9 metres wide bell first chimed initially in July 1859. That September, it too cracked. According to the manager of the foundrys, George Mears, the bell caster had used a hammer more than twice the maximum weight specified. For three years Big Ben was decommissioned and the hours were struck into the lowest of the ¼ bells until the main bell was reinstalled. To make the repair, the square piece of metal was chipped out from the rim around the crack, and the bell given an eighth of a turn so the new hammer strike in a different place. Big Ben has chimed with a odd twang ever since, and is still in use today completely with the crack. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 1 1 Imagine the following 270-word text is for an information website. You need to edit the text down to 100- 150 words and remove the ambiguities caused by misunderstanding of parts of speech. We have not changed the text much from the Wikipedia original, just edited out some sentences. You may want to research Big Ben’s history for clarification! If you are online, you can hear the chimes by using the link. Exercise 9.3 – the chimes Click to hear BBC World Service announce itself, then play Westminster Chimes and then the 12 strikes of Big Ben as broadcast at exactly midnight on New Year 1 January 2009. Along with the Great Bell, the belfry houses four quarter bells which play the Westminster Quarters on the quarter hours. The four quarter bells are the musical notes of G♯, F♯, E, and B. They were cast by John Warner & Sons at their Crescent Foundry in 1857 (G♯, F♯ and B) and 1858 (E). The Foundry was in Jewin Crescent, in what is now known as The Barbican, in the City of London. The Quarter Bells plays a 20-chime sequence, 1–4 at quarter past, 5–12 at half past, 13–20 and 1–4 at quarter to, and 5–20 on the hour (which sounds 25 seconds before the main bell tolls the hour). Because the low bell (B) is struck twice in quick succession, there is not enough time to pull a hammer back, and it is supplied with two wrench hammers on opposite sides of the bell. The tune is that of the Cambridge Chimes, first used for the chimes of Great St Mary's church, Cambridge, and supposedly a variation, attributed to William Crotch, on a phrase from Handel's Messiah. The notional words of the chime, again derived from Great St Mary's and in turn an allusion to Psalm 37, are: "All through this hour/Lord be my guide/And by Thy power/No foot shall slide". They are written on a plaque on the wall of the clock room. ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... ..................................................................................... Academic Skills, Cardiff Met, June 2010 P ag e 1 2 Answers to exercises 1.1 – naming parts of speech The article Palace noun a proper, phrasal noun reigning adjective of preposition monarch concrete noun Westminster proper noun opened adverb in preposition formally verb (past tense) 1852. abstract noun the article 2.1 – finding the nouns Big Ben is the nickname for the great bell of the clock at the north-eastern end of the Palace of Westminster in London, and is often extended to refer to the clock or the clock tower as well. It is the largest four-faced chiming clock and the third-tallest free-standing clock tower in the world. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in May 2009, during which celebratory events took place. The nearest London Underground station is Westminster on the Circle, District and Jubilee lines. 3.1 – putting the articles back Big Ben has become a(the) symbol of the United Kingdom and London, particularly in the(0) visual media. When a(the) television or film-maker wishes to indicate a generic location in Britain, a(the) popular way to do so is to show an(the) image of the clock tower, often with a red double-decker bus or black cab in the foreground. Big Ben is a(the) focus of New Year celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning to its chimes to welcome the start of the(a) year. () indicates alternatives. (0) indicates that you can choose not to use an article here. 4.1 – using pronouns 1. The Palace of Westminster site was strategically important during the Middle Ages, as it was located on the banks of the River Thames. 2. The Royal Commissioners chose Charles Barry's plan for a Gothic-style palace in 1840. They asked Charles Barry to complete it by 1847, though he did not actually satisfy them until 1860. 3. Sir Charles Barry's design for the Palace of Westminster uses the Perpendicular Gothic style. This/it was popular during the 15th century and returned during the Gothic revival of the 19th century. Barry was a classical architect, but he was aided by the Gothic architect Augustus Pugin. Famously, they fought over the symmetrical layout designed by Barry. Pugin commented to him: "All Grecian, sir; Tudor details on a classic body". 4.2 – using pronouns avoid repetition This answer is a suggestion only: yours may be different. For more exercises like this, see our worksheet on proofreading and editing. The building was originally constructed from Anston, a sand-coloured magnesian limestone quarried in the village of Anston in South Yorkshire: this, however, soon began to decay due to pollution and the poor quality of some of material used. 5.1 – finding adjectives Big Ben has become a symbol of the United Kingdom and London, particularly in the visual media. When a television or film maker wishes to indicate a generic location in Britain, a popular way to do so is to show an image of the clock tower, often with a red double-decker bus or black cab in the foreground. Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning to its chimes to welcome the start of the year. 6.1 – finding verbs Big Ben has become a symbol of the United Kingdom and London, particularly in the visual media. When a television or film-maker wishes to indicate a generic location in Britain, a popular way to do so is to show an image of the clock tower, often with a red double-decker bus or black cab in the foreground. Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning its chimes to welcome the start of the year. 7.1 – finding adverbs From 1939, the chimes rang on the quarter hours continuously, but the clock face was darkened at night to prevent attack by the heavily armed Zeppelins. Though the clock functioned perfectly during the war and up to 1962, heavy snow and ice that New Year’s Eve caused the pendulum to abruptly detach  split infinitive from the clockwork to avoid damaging seriously the sensitively-tuned mechanism. The 1963 New Year was ten minutes late. Not often silent, the Great Clock shut down for 26 separate days in 1976 and 1977 due to ‘torsional fatigue’; however popular myth has it that the clock got fed up with the exceptionally hot summer of 1976 and gave itself a holiday too. May 2005 briefly saw a shut-down, also attributable to hot weather. Note: boxed words look like adverbs but in fact they are adjectival modifiers, or words which change adjectives. As you can see, the split infinitive “to abruptly detach” does not affect the meaning at all.