One-page handouts to help explain common questions about English grammar and language phenomena. As always, feel free to contact me at drmarla@marlaperkins.com with any questions: your curiosity might inspire new handouts.
A short, but longer than one page, guide to learning how to concentrate: everyone wants to be able to do it, many people demand that it be done, and no one teaches how to do it–until now: concentrate
A quick, and very short, introduction to philosophy of language, mostly about reference:
Getting into language, words first, and some things that we can do with words, and some things that we can talk about with words:
About the lexicon, all of the information that people know about their own languages:
Phrases, Clauses, and Sentences, about ways to put words together:
More on sentences:
On prepositions and phrasal verbs, and distinguishing between them (it is possible!, even though some cases remain ambiguous):
On verb voices, with syntactic and semantic distinctions:
On verb tenses and aspects; tense is about time, and aspect is about process:
On verb valency, which most of us know as verbs and their subjects and objects:
On verbals, in which words look like verbs but have different jobs in the sentence:
Sometimes, those verbs look like nouns, so here’s a handout on nouns:
And sometimes, verbs and nouns have modifiers: