GRADE 5

ENGLISH

Nouns (common, proper)

A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea. Nouns are usually the first words which small children learn. The highlighted words in the following sentences are all nouns:

Late last year our neighbors bought a goat.

Portia White was an opera singer.

The bus inspector looked at all the passengers' passes.

According to Plutarch, the library at Alexandria was destroyed in 48 B.C.

Philosophy is of little comfort to the starving.

A noun can function in a sentence as a subject, a direct object, an indirect object, a subject complement, an object complement, an appositive, an adjective or an adverb.

Cases (Nominative, Objective, Possessive)

Although most students never truly think about it, nouns and pronouns have case. Latin has five; German has four. English has three cases: nominative, objective, and possessive. Regardless of how a noun functions in a sentence, it doesn’t change form. Therefore, no one bothers to think whether a noun is in the nominative or objective case; it simply doesn’t matter to a neophyte. However, a noun does change form when it falls in the possessive case. A noun changes form in the possessive case by adding an apostrophe and an s or if the noun is plural by adding s and an apostrophe:

The student’s book was found lying in the floor.

Boys’ gym clothes may be found in the bookstore.

Pronouns

Pronouns take the place of nouns. Personal pronouns have what is called case. Case means that a different form of a pronoun is used for different parts of the sentence. There are three cases: nominative, objective, possessive.

Nominative case pronouns are I, she, he, we, they, and who. They are used as subjects, predicate nominatives, and appositives when used with a subject or predicate nominative. Objective case pronouns are me, her, him, us, them, and whom. They are used as direct objects, indirect objects, objects of the preposition, and appositives when used with one of the objects. You and it are both nominative and objective case. Possessive case pronouns are my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, your, yours, their and theirs. They are used to show ownership.

Possessive pronouns never have apostrophes, but possessive nouns do. Do not confuse the possessive personal pronouns its, your, and their with the contractions it's (it is, it has), you're (you are), and they're (they are).

The same information in a more visual format:

Pronoun Cases
Nominative	Objective	Possessive
They are used as subjects, predicate nominatives, and appositives when used with a subject or predicate nominative.	They are used as direct objects, indirect objects, objects of the preposition, and appositives when used with one of the objects.	They are used to show ownership
I, she, he, we, they, and who You and it are both nominative and objective case	me, her, him, us, them, and whom. You and it are both nominative and objective case	my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, your, yours, their and theirs

Contractions vs. Possessive Pronouns
Contractions	Possessive (ownership)
it's (it is, it has), you're (you are), and they're (they are)	its, your, and their

*Possessive pronouns never have apostrophes, but possessive nouns do.

Practice Test

Adjectives

Definition

Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. The Articles — a, an, and the — are adjectives.

the tall professor
the lugubrious lieutenant
a solid commitment
a month's pay
a six-year-old child
the unhappiest, richest man

If a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adjective, it is called an Adjective Clause. My sister, who is much older than I am, is an engineer. If an adjective clause is stripped of its subject and verb, the resulting modifier becomes an Adjective Phrase: He is the man ~~who is~~ keeping my family in the poorhouse.

Before getting into other usage considerations, one general note about the use — or over-use — of adjectives: Adjectives are frail; don't ask them to do more work than they should. Let your broad-shouldered verbs and nouns do the hard work of description. Be particularly cautious in your use of adjectives that don't have much to say in the first place: interesting, beautiful, lovely, exciting. It is your job as a writer to create beauty and excitement and interest, and when you simply insist on its presence without showing it to your reader — well, you're convincing no one.

Verbs (Action and Being, Simple Tenses, Linking, Transitive and Intransitive, Agreement of Subject and Verb)

Definitions

Verbs carry the idea of being or action in the sentence.

I am a student.
The students passed all their courses.

As we will see on this page, verbs are classified in many ways. First, some verbs require an object to complete their meaning: "She gave _____ ?" Gave what? She gave money to the church. These verbs are called transitive. Verbs that are intransitive do not require objects: "The building collapsed." In English, you cannot tell the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb by its form; you have to see how the verb is functioning within the sentence. In fact, a verb can be both transitive and intransitive: "The monster collapsed the building by sitting on it."

Although you will seldom hear the term, a ditransitive verb — such as cause or give — is one that can take a direct object and an indirect object at the same time: "That horrid music gave me a headache." Ditransitive verbs are slightly different, then, from factitive verbs (see below), in that the latter take two objects.

Verbs are also classified as either finite or non-finite. A finite verb makes an assertion or expresses a state of being and can stand by itself as the main verb of a sentence.

The truck demolished the restaurant.
The leaves were yellow and sickly.

Non-finite verbs (think "unfinished") cannot, by themselves, be main verbs:

The broken window . . .
The wheezing gentleman . . .

Another, more useful term for non-finite verb is verbal. In this section, we discuss various verbal forms: infinitives, gerunds, and participles.

Adverbs (Time, Place, Manner)

Adverbs modify (describe) verbs, adjectives or other adverbs

communicative intent of adverbs

Adverbs answer these questions. Where? When? How? Why? and To what extent?

Adverbs are an adjective which can modify a verb, a clause, another adjective or a phrase.

Adjectives are generally turned into adverbs with the addition of a -ly suffix, though this is not a concrete rule.

Examples of adverbs are:

Jack is swimming quickly.
Unfortunately, he lost the race.
We told him to run much faster.

Manner - Adverbs which answer the question How?

Place - Adverbs which answer the question Where?

Time - Adverbs which answer the question of When?

Number - Adverbs which answer the question of How Often or How Many?

Purpose - Adverbs which answer the question Why?

developmental order

Since adverbs are used to answer WH questions, it might be assumed that the acquisition order of the communicative intent of manner, place, time, number, and purpose might well follow the same developmental order of question forms. If that is the case, then the resulting developmental order would be:

Place - Answers Where questions

Number - Answers How often or How many

Manner - Answers How question

Purpose - Answers Why question

Time - Answers When question

Prepositions, Conjunctions, Interjections

Common Prepositions - A preposition is a word that relates a noun or a pronoun to some other word in a sentence. A preposition describes a relationship between other words in a sentence. In itself, a word like "in" or "after" is rather meaningless and hard to define in mere words. For instance, when you do try to define a preposition like "in" or "between" or "on," you invariably use your hands to show how something is situated in relationship to something else. Prepositions are nearly always combined with other words in structures called prepositional phrases.

Conjunctions: Some words are satisfied spending an evening at home, alone, eating ice-cream right out of the box, watching Seinfeld re-runs on TV, or reading a good book. Others aren't happy unless they're out on the town, mixing it up with other words; they're joiners and they just can't help themselves. A conjunction is a joiner, a word that connects (conjoins) parts of a sentence

Interjections are words or phrases used to exclaim or protest or command. They sometimes stand by themselves, but they are often contained within larger structures.

Wow! I won the lottery!
Oh, I don't know about that.
I don't know what the heck you're talking about.
No, you shouldn't have done that.

Sentences

Sentence Structure

Before elaborating too much on the nature of sentences or trying to define a sentence's parts, it might be wise to define a sentence itself. A sentence is a group of words containing a subject and predicate. Sometimes, the subject is "understood," as in a command: "[You] go next door and get a cup of sugar." That probably means that the shortest possible complete sentence is something like "Go!" A sentence ought to express a thought that can stand by itself, but it would be helpful to review the section on Sentence Fragments for additional information on thoughts that cannot stand by themselves and sentences known as "stylistic fragments." The various Types of Sentences, structurally, are defined, with examples, under the section on sentence variety. Sentences are also defined according to function: declarative (most of the sentences we use), interrogative (which ask a question — "What's your name?"), exclamatory ("There's a fire in the kitchen!"), and imperative ("Don't drink that!")

Punctuation and Capitalization

Capitalization & Punctuation

Capitalize this!

The first word of every sentence.
The first-person singular pronoun, I.
The first, last, and important words in a title. (The concept "important words" usually does not include articles, short prepositions (which means you might want to capitalize "towards" or "between," say), the "to" of an infinitive, and coordinating conjunctions. This is not true in APA Reference lists (where we capitalize only the first word), nor is it necessarily true for titles in other languages. Also, on book jackets, aesthetic considerations will sometimes override the rules.)
Proper nouns
- Specific persons and things: George W. Bush, the White House, General Motors Corporation.
- Specific geographical locations: Hartford, Connecticut, Africa, Forest Park Zoo, Lake Erie, the Northeast, the Southend. However, we do not capitalize compass directions or locations that aren't being used as names: the north side of the city; we're leaving the Northwest and heading south this winter. When we combine proper nouns, we capitalize attributive words when they precede place-names, as in Lakes Erie and Ontario, but the opposite happens when the order is reversed: the Appalachian and Adirondack mountains. When a term is used descriptively, as opposed to being an actual part of a proper noun, do not capitalize it, as in "The California deserts do not get as hot as the Sahara Desert."
- Names of celestial bodies: Mars, Saturn, the Milky Way. Do not, howver, capitalize earth, moon, sun, except when those names appear in a context in which other (capitalized) celestial bodies are mentioned. "I like it here on earth," but "It is further from Earth to Mars than it is from Mercury to the Sun.
- Names of newspapers and journals. Do not, however, capitalize the word the, even when it is part of the newspaper's title: the Hartford Courant.
- Days of the week, months, holidays. Do not, however, capitalize the names of seasons (spring, summer, fall, autumn, winter). "Next winter, we're traveling south; by spring, we'll be back up north."
- Historical events: World War I, the Renaissance, the Crusades.
- Races, nationalities, languages: Swedes, Swedish, African American, Jewish, French, Native American. (Most writers do not capitalize whites, blacks.)
- Names of religions and religious terms: God, Christ, Allah, Buddha, Christianity, Christians, Judaism, Jews, Islam, Muslims.
- Names of courses: Economics, Biology 101. (However, we would write: "I'm taking courses in biology and earth science this summer.")
- Brand names: Tide, Maytag, Chevrolet.
Names of relationships only when they are a part of or a substitute for a person's name. (Often this means that when there is a modifier, such as a possessive pronoun, in front of such a word, we do not capitalize it.)
- Let's go visit Grandmother today. Let's go visit my grandmother today.
- I remember Uncle Arthur. I remember my Uncle Arthur. My uncle is unforgettable.
This also means that we don't normally capitalize the name of a "vocative" or term of endearment:
- Can you get the paper for me, honey?
- Drop the gun, sweetie. I didn't mean it.