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THE REFERENCE CORNER
Library of articles defining words & meaning
Subcategories of Language Category
LOGOPHILE | WORDS | WRITER | GRAMMAR
complete index of all pages in the language category and featured word lists.
THE REFERENCE CORNER
Library of articles defining words & meaning
Subcategories of Language Category
LOGOPHILE | WORDS | WRITER | GRAMMAR
ASSOCIATED BOOK DOWNLOAD
The Logophile Lexicon - Words About Words
My featured lexicon and guide to the language and words of logophiles, readers, writers and language enthusiasts. The book explores the beauty of creating, using and defining words. This feature presents the beautiful words in this book. It’s free and easy to download.
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My featured lexicon and guide to the language and words of logophiles, readers, writers and language enthusiasts. The book explores the beauty of creating, using and defining words. This feature presents the beautiful words in this book. It’s free and easy to download.
PREVIEW | VIEW ONLINE | DOWNLOAD
www.logophilelexicon.com
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THE LOQUACIOUS LITERARY LOGOPHILE: defining logophile and more in this collection of linguistic, literary & writing words.
From the Logophile Lexicon.
WORDS ABOUT WORDS: study of words. Includes word formation, classifications, form, usage, and literary, poetic and rhetorical devices.
THE WRITER’S CRAFT: the celebration of language as demonstrated in storytelling and the poetic expressions of the writer’s craft.
VISIT THE REFERENCE CORNER: Library of articles defining words and meaning including formation, classification, etymology, writing fiction and composing poetry.
From the Logophile Lexicon.
WORDS ABOUT WORDS: study of words. Includes word formation, classifications, form, usage, and literary, poetic and rhetorical devices.
THE WRITER’S CRAFT: the celebration of language as demonstrated in storytelling and the poetic expressions of the writer’s craft.
VISIT THE REFERENCE CORNER: Library of articles defining words and meaning including formation, classification, etymology, writing fiction and composing poetry.
THE GRAMMAR PRIMER
DIRECTORY
- The Root of Meaning for the Grammarian - the composition of grammar
- That Sting From a Ruler Means Follow the Rules - Refresh your basic grammar rules
- Who’s on First? The Prefix or Suffix? - Reboot your knowledge on word structure
- The Sum Parts of Everything - The parts of speech
- Get to the Point and Punctuate - the rules of punctuation
- Why is That Not on My Keyboard? - Obscure punctuation nobody knows about and everybody needs
Calculating the Sum of All Parts of Speech
Download the Logophile Lexicon for a More In-Depth Look at These Components
PARTS OF SPEECH
PARTS OF SPEECH (POS) is a category of words (or lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words assigned to the same part of speech display similar syntactic behavior, they play for the same team within the grammatical structure of sentences.
Most Indo-European languages have essentially all these word classes with a couple exceptions; Latin, Sanskrit and most Slavic languages do not have articles and Hungarian and Finnish both completely lack prepositions or have only very few.
- The starting lineup of players are the noun (nomen), verb (verbum), adjective (adjectivum), adverb (adverbium), pronoun (pronomen), preposition (praepositio) and conjunction (conjunctio).
- The players on the bench waiting for their turn at bat are the interjection (interjectio), numeral (numerale), article, and determiner.
- The supporting members of the team include the word class, lexical class, and lexical category.
Most Indo-European languages have essentially all these word classes with a couple exceptions; Latin, Sanskrit and most Slavic languages do not have articles and Hungarian and Finnish both completely lack prepositions or have only very few.
NOUNS - refer to people, places, or things. Even intangible or abstract concepts like ideas or thoughts are things.
VERBS - action words: that’s a rather simplified explanation, but it’s the clearest one. Verbs tell you what the subject of the sentence is up to.
PRONOUNS - words that replace nouns. I, me, she, we, they, who, that, yours, his, her, etc.
ADJECTIVES - descriptive words that add detail to a sentence. They can give important or necessary information.
PREPOSITIONS - little words that tell where or when (among other things) something is.
CONJUNCTIONS - words like and, but, and or that connect concepts, clauses, or parts of sentences.
INTERJECTIONS - a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction like the words like wow and yay. They’re sounds we make to convey extreme emotion or to create emphasis when we’re talking, sometimes when we can’t think of a good way to express ourselves. The problem with interjections is that they require a great deal of context to be understood. For instance, “hey” can mean hello, or that’s great, or stop doing that.
NUMERALS - a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity. Some theories refer to the quantity of a noun, for example the "two" in "two hats". Other theories do not include determiners as a part of speech and consider "two" to be an adjective. And another theory considers "numeral" to be a synonym for "number" and assigns all numbers to it. Numerals can also be analyzed as:
ARTICLES - are any members of a class of words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. Both "the" and "a" are articles, which then combine with a noun to form a noun phrase. Articles typically specify grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase, but in many languages they carry additional grammatical information such as gender, number, and case.
DETERMINER - is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and expresses the reference in context. A determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common determiners include:
- The house, England, my mother, the phone
VERBS - action words: that’s a rather simplified explanation, but it’s the clearest one. Verbs tell you what the subject of the sentence is up to.
- He ran into the wall. She buys new shoes. The cat licks its fur.
PRONOUNS - words that replace nouns. I, me, she, we, they, who, that, yours, his, her, etc.
- Pronouns need antecedents. That means that the thing (or person, or place) that the pronoun refers to needs to have been mentioned already by name somewhere earlier in the sentence or paragraph. If it’s not clear which thing the pronoun refers to, the reader can get quite confused.
ADJECTIVES - descriptive words that add detail to a sentence. They can give important or necessary information.
- They can just make the sentence more interesting
- A frigid wind blew around the icy town.
- Adjectives describe nouns.
- Please sew the red dress. The weather is hot and humid . The stuffed toy is fuzzy and round
PREPOSITIONS - little words that tell where or when (among other things) something is.
- The cat is on his back. The glue is behind the board. The poster is above the bed.
CONJUNCTIONS - words like and, but, and or that connect concepts, clauses, or parts of sentences.
- I wanted to meet her there on time, but I got stuck in traffic. You can’t wear socks and sandals.
INTERJECTIONS - a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction like the words like wow and yay. They’re sounds we make to convey extreme emotion or to create emphasis when we’re talking, sometimes when we can’t think of a good way to express ourselves. The problem with interjections is that they require a great deal of context to be understood. For instance, “hey” can mean hello, or that’s great, or stop doing that.
- It is a diverse category that has many different parts of speech, such as exclamations (ouch!), curses (damn!), greetings (hey), responses (okay), hesitation markers (uh, er, um) and other words (cool).
- Due to its diversity, interjections partly overlap categories like profanity, discourse markers and fillers.
NUMERALS - a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity. Some theories refer to the quantity of a noun, for example the "two" in "two hats". Other theories do not include determiners as a part of speech and consider "two" to be an adjective. And another theory considers "numeral" to be a synonym for "number" and assigns all numbers to it. Numerals can also be analyzed as:
- Nouns: "three is a small number"
- Pronouns: "the two went to town"
- Adverbs: "I rode the slide twice"
ARTICLES - are any members of a class of words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. Both "the" and "a" are articles, which then combine with a noun to form a noun phrase. Articles typically specify grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase, but in many languages they carry additional grammatical information such as gender, number, and case.
DETERMINER - is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and expresses the reference in context. A determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common determiners include:
- Definite and indefinite articles (the - a - an)
- Demonstratives (this - that)
- Possessive determiners (my - their)
- Cardinal numerals
- Quantifiers (many - all - no)
- Distributive determiners (each - any)
- Interrogative determiners (which)
WORD CLASSES
Word classes are either open or closed.
OPEN CLASSES:
CLOSED CLASSES
Word classes are either open or closed.
OPEN CLASSES:
- Accepts the addition of new words,
- Normally contain large numbers of words
- Contain nouns, verbs (excluding auxiliary verbs), adjectives, adverbs and interjections.
- Contain ideophones, although these are less familiar to English speakers
- Often open to nonce words.
- Add to the class by compounding, derivation, coining, and borrowing.
CLOSED CLASSES
- New items are rarely added.
- Are much smaller than open classes.
- Contains prepositions (or postpositions), determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.
- Adding to the class is similar to open class but it is rare. A closed class is is the core language and is not expected to change.
IT’S A LITTLE TENSE IN HERE
VERB TENSES - verbs come in past, present, and future tenses.
CAN WE ALL COME TO AN AGREEMENT?
SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT - singular subjects take singular verbs and plural subjects take plural verbs.
PRONOUN-ANTECEDENT AGREEMENT - When a pronoun replaces a noun, the noun is called an antecedent.
LET’S SET THE MOOD
SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD - subjunctive is a form verbs can take to express conditions that are hypothetical or not true. It’s not a verb tense. The subjunctive form usually uses the third-person form of the verb with the ‑s dropped. When using the verb “to be” in the subjunctive, the present tense is be and the past tense is were. The subjunctive is used with certain expressions that imply a good or bad quality or an imperative. Often, the subjunctive verb is preceded by the word that in the phrases it the best.
VERB TENSES - verbs come in past, present, and future tenses.
- PAST: The past is used to describe things that have already happened
- earlier in the day, yesterday, last week, three years ago
- PRESENT: The present tense is used to describe things that are happening right now, or things that are continuous.
- FUTURE: The future tense describes things that have yet to happen
- later, tomorrow, next week, next year, three years from now
CAN WE ALL COME TO AN AGREEMENT?
SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT - singular subjects take singular verbs and plural subjects take plural verbs.
PRONOUN-ANTECEDENT AGREEMENT - When a pronoun replaces a noun, the noun is called an antecedent.
- On Michael’s first day of work, he was a little nervous. Michael is the antecedent and he is the pronoun.
- The antecedent doesn’t have to go before the pronoun, but in longer sentences it can be confusing to introduce the pronoun before the antecedent.
- On his first day of work, Michael was a little nervous.
LET’S SET THE MOOD
SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD - subjunctive is a form verbs can take to express conditions that are hypothetical or not true. It’s not a verb tense. The subjunctive form usually uses the third-person form of the verb with the ‑s dropped. When using the verb “to be” in the subjunctive, the present tense is be and the past tense is were. The subjunctive is used with certain expressions that imply a good or bad quality or an imperative. Often, the subjunctive verb is preceded by the word that in the phrases it the best.
- The subjunctive mood can express conditions that are not true: If I were queen for a day, I would eat cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
- It can express hypothetical situations: If I were to design a dresser, it would be made of teak.
- It can be used to express wishes: I wish I were able to go on vacation with you.
- It can express commands or demands: The boss demanded that he complete the project or be fired.
- It can express suggestions: I suggest that she cut back on refined sugar to improve her health
RELATED RESOURCES AND WORD LISTS
Rules of Grammar Keep You Safe from Trolls
The Tale of the Grammatical Faux Pas Calculating the Sum of All Parts of Speech
Punctuating the Point - the Rules of Punctuation
Punctuating with Obscurity
To Prefix or To Suffix - Now That is the Question
Whipping Up a Latin or Greek Prefix
From the Reference Corner
Misusing a Word Means 20 to Life in the Pen
FBI Most Wanted List of Word Misuse
Rules of Grammar Keep You Safe from Trolls
The Tale of the Grammatical Faux Pas Calculating the Sum of All Parts of Speech
Punctuating the Point - the Rules of Punctuation
Punctuating with Obscurity
To Prefix or To Suffix - Now That is the Question
Whipping Up a Latin or Greek Prefix
From the Reference Corner
Misusing a Word Means 20 to Life in the Pen
FBI Most Wanted List of Word Misuse
VISIT THE REFERENCE CORNER
Library of articles defining words & meaning
LOGOPHILE | WORDS | WRITER | GRAMMAR
Language WordMap
Library of articles defining words & meaning
LOGOPHILE | WORDS | WRITER | GRAMMAR
Language WordMap
A BEAUTIFUL WORD ... a vocabulary site for logophiles, writers and word lovers that is part of
A SERIES OF BEAUTIFUL WORDS
Collection of Vocabulary Books, Sites and Resources
Series Homepage | View Sites | Download Books
Words are also posted on twitter under the hashtags #beautifulwords and #wordoftheday and shared visually on pinterest bulletin boards
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Content by Kairos ~ @kairosoflife
Homepage | Portfolio | Contact
Original content © 2021 Copyright, Kairos
A SERIES OF BEAUTIFUL WORDS
Collection of Vocabulary Books, Sites and Resources
Series Homepage | View Sites | Download Books
Words are also posted on twitter under the hashtags #beautifulwords and #wordoftheday and shared visually on pinterest bulletin boards
ABOUT SITE | SITEMAPS | SEARCH | FEEDBACK
Content by Kairos ~ @kairosoflife
Homepage | Portfolio | Contact
Original content © 2021 Copyright, Kairos
