Grammar of English

The list of online resources is not meant to be comprehensive – it couldn’t be - but is meant to provide a few of the resources that are available. Some are just meant to be fun additions, e.g. the extra headlines in chapter 2. Under each chapter, the practice texts from the book are also repeated so that you can use the same text multiple times.

General

Corpora to use if you want to check a sentence are the free BNC and COCA. The Oxford English Dictionary is unfortunately not available without buying access. Many university libraries have such access, e.g. Arizona State University. You might like to browse some History of English and American Dialect Society sites as well. A page of linguistics resources that I find helpful can be found at Karen Chung's site and then there is a dictionary of slang.

Chapter 1

A review of many of the prescriptive rules from a UCLA class; ambiguous headlines from Bucknell, and at `fun with words' and another site. New words can be found at double tongued and the Merriam Webster site. English may be acquiring (have acquired) its millionth word!. Powerpoint for chapter 1 can be found here.

Chapter 2

The text analyzer will give you a way to get the frequency of words in a text you want. Lists of prepositions are available at the English Club and in Wikipedia and there is a preposition project with 334 prepositions.There is a site that lists 3738 adverbs and isn't even complete (where, why, etc. are missing) and more on adverbs. A powerpoint on lexical categories can be found here and on grammatical categories here. There is also a review of Chapter 2

Chapter 3

For some examples where object and adverbials are preposed, listen to Yoda and here’s something light on yoda speech. Extra practice chapter 3: Trees-NP.

Chapter 4

Other languages have the same functions that English has; see direct objects in Spanish. A brief ppt for chapter 4 may be helpful. Additional practice can be found here.

Chapter 5

A dictionary of phrasal verbs is helpful perhaps. Additional practice appears here. Extra practice for chapter 5 and a review of chapters 4 and 5 can be found here.

Chapter 6

Nice graph for all the tense and aspects;

A list of irregular verbs at: http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/verbs.htm and http://www.englishpage.com/irregularverbs/irregularverbs.html.

The rule for -tted or -ted; tricky (at least for me).

Many versions of Frog went a-courting: http://home.earthlink.net/~highying/froggy/froggy.html

Chapter 8

Misplaced modifiers are interesting!

Other sites on the use of –ing: troubles with verbs and from the English Club. n ESL site on the use of -ing vs infinitive.

Chapter 9

Two sites on the order of adjectives: one at York and one from the English Corner. Extra practice on PPs as modifiers of Ns or as Adverbials can be found here.

Other WEBsites that may be relevant

http://aliscot.com/bigdog

http://learning.cl3.ust.hk/english-grammar-guide/frame.htm

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing

(last updated October 2010)