Illocutionary

An act performed by a speaker by virtue of uttering certain words, as for example the acts of promising or of threatening. Illocutionary acts are linguistic acts in which one can be said to do something - like stating, denying or asking.

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Indefinite Numeral Adjective

Indefinite numeral adjectives are those adjectives which do not show the exact numerical amount of noun however give general idea of that amount.

For example:                                           

Many, some, any, few, all, several, etc.

   “I saw only few people present at the meeting.”

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Indefinite Pronouns

Indefinite pronouns are those referring to one or more unspecified objects, beings, or places. They are called “indefinite” simply because they do not indicate the exact object, being, or place to which they refer.

Indefinite pronouns include partitives such as any, anybody, anyone, either, neither, nobody, no, someone, and some; they also include universals such as every, all, both, and each; finally, they include quantifiers including any, some, several, enough, many, and much

There are just two important rules for using indefinite pronouns correctly. 

·         Indefinite pronouns are never plural. They are always singular.

·         Because indefinite pronouns are singular, the pronouns or verbs used to refer to them should also be singular.

Examples of Indefinite Pronouns

In the following examples, the indefinite pronouns are italicized.

·         Many are called, but few are chosen.

·         Somebody ate my sandwich!

·         Everyone says she is beautiful inside and out.

·         No one wants to hear about my health problems.

·         Either choice has its advantages.

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Inflectional morphology

Inflectional morphology is the study of the processes (such as affixation and vowel change) that distinguish the forms of words in certain grammatical categories.

In comparison to many other languages, the inflectional system of Modern English is fairly limited. (See inflectional morphemes.)

Inflectional morphology is customarily distinguished from derivational morphology (or word formation).

As A.Y. Aikhenvald points out, "Derivational morphology results in the creation of a new word with a new meaning. In contrast, inflectional morphology involves an obligatory grammatical specification characteristic of a word class" ("Typological Distinctions in Word-Formation" in Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 2007). This distinction, however, is not always clear-cut.

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Interrogative Adjectives

An Interrogative adjective modifies a noun or a noun phrase and is similar to the interrogative pronoun. It does not stand on its own and includes words such as, which, what, who, whose, whom, where and so on.

For example:

'What dress are you wearing?' Here, 'what' modifies the noun 'dress' and is the object of the compound verb 'are wearing'.

Other examples:

Which leaves turn color first?

Whose son is he?

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Interrogative pronouns

 An interrogative pronoun is a pronoun which is used to make asking questions easy. There are just five interrogative pronouns. Each one is used to ask a very specific question or indirect question. 

Interrogative pronouns can also be used as relative pronouns, which may be found in questions or indirect questions.

You’ll know for certain that a pronoun is classified as an interrogative when it’s used in an inquiring way, because interrogative pronouns are found only in question and indirect questions.

·         Who

·         Whose

·         Whom

·         Which

·         What

What

Used to ask questions about things, actions, activities, general descriptions and specific information (unlimited choice).

·         What did you buy?

·         What happened?

·         What is your brother like?

·         What sort of cars do you like driving?

Which

Used to ask about people or things (limited choice)

·         Which students will participate?

·         Which of these sweaters do you like best?

·         Which color do you prefer?

·         She asked which train to take.

Who

Used to ask about people.

·         Who is your best friend?

·         I’m wondering who will be at the party.

·         Who is going to take out the trash?

·         Who is that?

Whom

This interrogative pronoun is rarely seen these days, but when it shows up, it is used to ask questions about people. (More formal than who)

·         Whom did you speak to?

·         Whom do you prefer to vote for?

·         Whom do you live with?

Whose

Used to ask questions about people or objects, always related to possession.

·         Whose sweater is this?

·         Whose parents are those?

·         I wonder whose dog knocked our garbage can over.

In some cases, interrogative pronouns take on the suffix –ever: 

Whatever                     Whatsoever                  Whichever                    Whomsoever

Whoever                      Whosoever                   Whomever                    Whosever

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Intonation

The sound changes produced by the rise and fall of the voice when speaking, especially when this has an effect on the meaning of what is said

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Irregular Verbs

     Perhaps you think that "irregular" means something out of the ordinary, and in common parlance it does, but if you look up irregular in the dictionary, you'll see that the first definition is a little different. "Irregular" describes something that does not adhere to established rules.

Irregular verbs don’t take on the regular –d, -ed, or -ied spelling patterns of the past simple, or past participle.

Irregular verbs live by their own set of rules; they are the mavericks of the English language. Most of the verbs in the English language are irregular verbs.

Irregular verbs are also known as strong verbs. Here are nine that are used more often than the rest. These nine irregular verb examples also happen to be among the most commonly used words in the English language. They are:

 Go                              Get                              Say                           See                Think

 Make                         Take                            Come                        Know

Conjugation for an Irregular Verb

Any verb that does not break down using the rules of tenses like "to walk" is an irregular verb. That means that the conjugation is not based on the rules of tenses; but rather on the specific conjugation which is used for the word. This means that verbal conjugation is a game of memorization. You need to memorize the specific conjugation for each irregular verb.

The past tense and past participle are the forms that are normally made in irregular fashion. About 200 verbs in normal use have irregularities in one or other (or usually both) of these forms. They may derive from Germanic strong verbs, as with sing–sang–sung or rise–rose–risen, or from weak verbs which have come to deviate from the standard pattern in some way (teach–taught–taught, keep–kept–kept, build–built–built, etc.). (Usually, past participle sometimes ends in "n", "d" or "ed".) They change in spelling sometimes. (Past and Past participle only.)

Learning Irregular Verbs

Since there are no specific rules regarding conjugating the tenses of irregular verbs, the only way to really learn them is to keep your ears open.

Impact of the Misuse of Irregular Verbs

The English language works, more or less, without paying too much attention to whether the speaker is using the verb correctly or not. When an English learner says, "yesterday I speaked with the President," it makes as much sense as if he'd said "spoke." That flexibility is why English remains the lingua franca; one does not have to speak it properly to be understood.

Since people can understand English even when it is spoken incorrectly, using an irregular verb correctly isn't critical to be understood. Other languages have conjugation rules that are all but required just to get a simple point across. In English following the rules are not critical to be understood.

Benefit of Proper Use of Irregular Verbs

If you want to sound intelligent or at least like a native speaker, you should mind your irregular verbs. They aren't hard to remember, and they really do make a difference when you're speaking with anyone whose opinion you care about. Having a firm grasp on one’s irregular verbs displays a command of the English language. Most importantly, if you know your irregular verbs, you'll sound smart.

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Lexical Morphology

Lexical Morphology is a theoretical model first proposed in Pesetsky (1979), and elaborated in Kiparsky (1982). Although it is impossible to say that there is a single model of Lexical Morphology (also known as Lexical Phonology), all theories have in common that the word formation rules and the phonological rules both apply in a single component of the grammar, viz. the Lexicon. 

We will present here a brief outline of Kiparsky's (1982) model, and next refer to a number of publications in which this model has undergone more or less significant changes. Siegel's (1974) Level Ordering Hypothesis and the Kiparsky-Mascaró theory of Cyclic Phonology lie at the heart of the development of Kiparsky's (1982) model of Lexical Morphology/Phonology. Within Cyclic Phonology it is assumed that cyclicity is a stipulated property of rules, and that cyclic application is a mode of application which is not an inherent property of the grammar. The basic idea of Kiparsky's (1982) paper is that the cyclic application of phonological rules should follow from the organization of the lexicon. 

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Lexicon

Is the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word "lexicon" derives from the Greek λεξικόν (lexicon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning "of or for words.

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Lexicography

It is the process of writing, editing, and/or compiling a dictionary. An author or editor of a dictionary is called a lexicographer. The processes involved in the compilation and implementation of digital dictionaries.

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Lexicology

It is the part of linguistics which studies words. This may include their nature and function as symbols, their meaning, the relationship of their meaning to epistemology in general, and the rules of their composition from smaller elements (morphemes such as the English -ed marker for past or un- for negation; and phonemes as basic sound units).

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Linking Verbs (Copulative Verbs)

Linking verbs do not express action. Instead, they connect the subject of the verb to additional information about the subject. They show a relationship between the subject of the sentence and a noun or adjective being linked to it.

My dog is an Akita. (Dog and Akita are linked because they are the same thing.)
My cat is very furry. (Cat and furry are linked because furry describes the cat.)

·         The most common linking verbs are forms of the verb to be: am, is, are, was, were, being, been.

·         Other common linking verbs include: appear, become, feel, grow, look, remain, seem, smell, sound, stay, taste, and turn.

To check if these are being used as linking verbs, try replacing them with the correct form of to be. If they make sense and have almost the same meaning, they are linking verbs.

Laurie appears tired

Laurie appears is tired

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Locutionary

It is the performance of an utterance, and hence of a speech act. The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act, as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not).

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Material Nouns

 Material Noun are names of materials or substances out of which things are made. Ex: gold, iron, silver etc.”

Material noun is the name given to the material, substance or things made up of alloy. It refers to the type of substance instead of individual particles of the substance. Material nouns are not countable means we cannot count them because they are in the forms of liquid, semi-liquid or solid. This noun is especially called as material noun because nouns in this class are almost materials like cloth, air, metal, gold, salt, iron, silver, steel, brass, bronze, copper, aluminium, lead, coal, coral, gem, diamond, glass, fibre, calcium, plastic, rubber, paper, cement, paint, plywood, synthetics, shampoo, soap, perfume, wine, tar, chemical, rexene etc. Sometimes we cannot make the plural forms of material noun.

Some of the material nouns are used as the count nouns, for example; 'wine' as one may talk about different wines, type of wine instead of the substance of wine. So, here we can say that wine is not a material noun as type of wine is countable. We can say that material nouns are common nouns as they denote substances instead of denoting people or places.

For examples:

• Cotton dresses are very cheap and comfortable.
• My mom purchased a gold ring for me.
• I drink milk in the silver
• My father has a shop for diamonds.
• Calcium is a good mineral for health.
• Plastic is made up of many molecules of ethylene.
• There are many utensils in my kitchen made up of iron.
• Taj Mahal is built using marbles.
• I drink milk daily in the night.
• Most of the industries use fibre.
• In the ancient time, most of the kitchen utensils were made up of brass.

Categorized Examples of Material Nouns

Material nouns are names given to the raw elements or objects exist in the nature and cannot be created by human being, however many new things can be created by man using raw materials. The main source of raw materials are nature, animals and plants. We have provided below the list of common nouns under various categories such as:

Material nouns from nature: water, air, silver, gold, iron, copper, sand, coal, rock, sunlight, rain, earth, salt, etc.

Material nouns from animals: egg, meat, honey, milk, silk, leather, wool, etc.

Material nouns from plants: cotton, food, oil, wood, jute, coffee, medicine, tea, rubber, perfume, etc.

Man made material nouns: acid, alcohol, asphalt, brick, cement, butter, chalk, ghee, cheese, dacron, ebony, enamel, felt, gelatin, paraffin, cloth, etc.

Rules to be followed while using material nouns in the Sentence:

Following are the rules you need to remember in order to make use of material nouns in the sentence.

a) Generally, articles (a, an or the) are not used with material nouns when they are uncountable such as:

• Honey is wholesome food and beneficial to health.
• Water boils only at 100°C temperature.

b) Articles (a and an) may be used with material nouns when they are countable (denoting types of material or showing helping nature) such as:

• I would like to eat a Dutch cheese.
• It is a very healthy wine.

c) Use of 'the' and 'some' can also be done in the following way:

• The honey in the bottle is mine. Don’t give it others!
• I saw there is some milk in the glass.

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Meaning

Ferdinand de Saussure in founding semiology, his original subset of the semiotics, started describing language in terms of Signs, dividing those signs in turn into signifieds and signifiers. The signifier is the perceptive side of a sign, thus the sound form in case of oral language. The signified is the signification (semantic) side, the mental construction or image associated with the sound, by either a speaker and hearer. A sign, then, is essentially a relationship between signified and signifier.

Signs are essentially conventional, as any foreign language student is well aware: there is no reason that bat couldn't mean "body of water" or even "that bust of Napoleon over there". Since the choice of signifiers is ultimately arbitrary, the meaning cannot somehow be in the signifier. Saussure instead defers meaning to the sign itself: meaning is ultimately the same thing as the sign, and meaning means that relationship is between signified and signifier. All meaning is both within us and communal, thus cultural. Signs "mean" by reference to our internal lexicon and grammar, and despite there being a matter of convention, so the communal part, signs also, because of the individual's uniqueness, can mean something only to the individual (what red means to one person may not be what red means to another, either in absolute value, or by including what's suggested by the context). However, while meanings carried by one given set of signifiers may vary to some extent from individual to individual, only those meanings that stay within a boundary are seen by other speakers of the language to belong to the language: if one were to refer to smells as red, most other speakers would assume the person is talking nonsense (although statements like this are common among people who experience synesthesia, or in poetry).

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Metaphor

Metaphor is a figure of speech that refers, for rhetorical effect, to one thing by mentioning another thing. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile are all types of metaphor. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature is the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances[...]

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7

This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it.

The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1937) by rhetorician I. A. Richards describes a metaphor as having two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the object whose attributes are borrowed. In the previous example, "the world" is compared to a stage, describing it with the attributes of "the stage"; "the world" is the tenor, and "a stage" is the vehicle; "men and women" is the secondary tenor, and "players" is the secondary vehicle.

Other writers employ the general terms ground and figure to denote the tenor and the vehicle. Cognitive linguistics uses the terms target and source, respectively.

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Metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept. The words metonymy and metonym come from the Greek: μετωνῠμία, metōnymía, ("a change of name"), from μετά, metá, ("after, beyond"), and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix that names figures of speech, from ὄνῠμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, ("name").

The location of a capital is often used as a metonym for a government or other official institutions—for example: Brussels for the institutions of the European Union, Nairobi for the government of Kenya, Washington, D.C., for the federal government of the United States, or Beacon Hill for the government of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. A place can represent an entire industry: for instance Wall Street is often used metonymically to describe the entire U.S. financial and corporate banking sector. Common nouns and phrases can also be metonyms: red tape can stand for bureaucracy, whether or not that bureaucracy actually uses red tape to bind documents. In Commonwealth realms, The Crown is a metonym for the state in all its aspects.

Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, multiple meanings of a single word or phrase, sometimes results from relations of metonymy. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things, whereas in metonymy the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity.

American literary theorist Kenneth Burke described metonymy as one of four "master tropes": metaphor, a substitute for perspective; metonymy, a substitute for reduction; synecdoche, a substitute for representation; and irony, a substitute for dialectic. He described these tropes and the way they overlap in A Grammar of Motives.

In addition to its use in everyday speech, metonymy is a figure of speech in some poetry and in much rhetoric. Greek and Latin scholars of rhetoric made significant contributions to the study of metonymy.

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Modal Auxiliary Verbs.

Modal auxiliary verbs never change form. You cannot add an -ed, -ing, or -s ending to these words. Can, could, may, might, must, ought to, shall, should, will, and would have only one form.

You can use modal auxiliary verbs in these patterns:

MODAL + MAIN VERB

MODAL + BE + PRESENT PARTICIPLE

MODAL + HAVE + PAST PARTICIPLE

With modal auxiliaries, you can indicate necessity or obligation:

To lose her orange glow, Yvonne should eat fewer carrots.

John must remember his wife's birthday this year.

If Cecilia wants a nice lawn, she ought to be raking the leaves.

Or you can show possibility:

Fred might share his calculus homework if you offer him a slice of pizza.

Ann could have run the half marathon if she had started to train four months ago.

Modal auxiliaries also show willingness or ability:

Nicole will babysit your pet iguana for a reasonable fee.

Jason can pass chemistry this semester if he stops spending his study time at the arcade.

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