If You Were an Adverb: 0 (Word Fun)

Introduction to singular and plural nouns. Plural and singular nouns. Video transcript - [Voiceover] Hello grammarians. Welcome to the English parts of speech.

We're gonna begin with the noun, the lovely wonderful noun, your friend and mine. They're mostly what you're gonna encounter in sentences. Most sentences in English contain at least one noun or a pronoun, but we'll get to pronouns later. A noun is basically anything. And I know that's not an especially helpful definition, but we'll get more specific in a minute. A noun is basically anything at all. Now the way this is taught in traditional grammar is to say that a noun is a person, place or thing, which is fine, I think we can make that a little bit sharper and expand that out by saying that they are, that nouns are people or living things, places, things, or ideas.

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I think ideas is the one that usually gets left out. So nouns can be people, places, things and ideas. Let's put that in action. So, this is Raul. He is from Argentina. He is a penguin. Raul has big dreams. So, I wanna take these three sentences and find the noun in them using the test. So the test is, is it a person or a living thing, a place, a thing, or an idea?

Introduction to nouns

And if it's any of those things, then it falls into the category of words in English which we call nouns. So, sentence number one.

Well, Raul is a person or a living thing so we're just gonna say person so noun. Now Argentina happens to be a place so therefore, it is also a noun. It's a kind of noun called a proper noun, just like Raul is but we'll get to that later.

So, Argentina is a noun. Argentina incidentally is a country and the word country is also a noun because it is a thing. They may use adjective forms to modify verbs. For example, the students use good — a word that is normally an adjective - as an adverb. One student says "we won't do good on the test. In writing and in formal conversation, Americans generally do not use the word "good" this way.

Instead, they use the word well. In formal writing or speaking, you would be more likely to see or hear the sentence "we won't do well on the test. For example, the student says "today is going slow," instead of "today is going slowly. These grammatical structures are not necessarily slang. They are not necessarily impolite , either.

You might hear some of these structures in a restaurant, at a job fair, or even at work. For example, a boss might tell an employee "We need to do this quick," about a project that must be completed quickly. Conrad and Biber say that in formal speech and writing, adjective forms are almost never used to modify verbs. In addition, adverbs with —ly endings are more common in writing — particularly in academic and news writing.

The good news is this: What we hope to do is show you that the grammatical patterns in conversation do not always match the patterns used in formal writing or speech.

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There is more flexibility in casual speech. Understanding this idea will help you understand Americans when they speak, and it will help you sound more natural when you speak to Americans. You might also be pleased to know that Americans will not judge you severely if you use an adjective in place of an adverb. In fact, they probably would do the same!

A Corpus-Based Approach to English" pgs. Adverb and Adjective Choices in Conversation.