Handouts

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:

phillang

 

Getting into language, words first, and some things that we can do with words, and some things that we can talk about with words:

words

 

About the lexicon, all of the information that people know about their own languages:

lexicon

 

Phrases, Clauses, and Sentences, about ways to put words together:

phclse

 

More on sentences:

moronsent

 

On prepositions and phrasal verbs, and distinguishing between them (it is possible!, even though some cases remain ambiguous):

prephrverb

 

On verb voices, with syntactic and semantic distinctions:

verbvoice

 

On verb tenses and aspects; tense is about time, and aspect is about process:

verbta

 

On verb valency, which most of us know as verbs and their subjects and objects:

valency

 

On verbals, in which words look like verbs but have different jobs in the sentence:

verbals

 

Sometimes, those verbs look like nouns, so here’s a handout on nouns:

nouns

 

And sometimes, verbs and nouns have modifiers:

modifiers