Chapter 5: Get used to grammatical terms

GRAMMAR 5

THE SKELETON SENTENCE— Part 1

	In Chapter 2 we talked about how important grammatical terms are. Do you remember example we used to explain why we need grammatical terms to describe different concepts?
	I think it was a sentence about a tutor and some students: Die Studenten korrigiert der Tutor The tutor corrects the students. You asked who was correcting whom, right?
	Right! Now let's take a sentence from the last chapter:
	Die moderne Technologie verändert die Welt der Fotografie.

In Chapter 4 you learned to analyse noun phrases by identifying articles, nouns, and adjectives, all word categories.

Now put your knowledge to the test and see if you can identify every word in the sentence above by its
category. Let's see if you understand which words are related and form simple noun phrases.
This will help improve your reading ability.

You may even be able to guess which two simple noun phrases form a complex one.

If you'd like to practice right now in a hands-on exercise, please click the button . A new window will open on top of this one.

Grammatical function of a word in a sentence

Very good. Analysing a word in a sentence is only the first step in identifying the word category. This enables you to see how a given word is related to others within a phrase, which in turn gives you a handle on the meaning.

The second step is to identify the grammatical function of the word or phrase in the sentence.

This is crucial to a full understanding of the text that you're about to read.

If you're already familiar with terms like "subject," "predicate," and "object,"
you can skip the rest of this chapter and proceed to Chapter 6.