What the tool does:
Parts of speech
At school, we learn about the grammatical use of words. There are parts of speech,
such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. Unfortunately, a given word may
actually have a number of these. The word man can be a noun and a verb, for
example. "Can you MAN the station?" (verb) versus "The MAN is tall" (noun). The
actual grammatical use in the sentence is displayed by the program.
Irregular word forms
This sounds complicated, but it isn't. An irregular form is just a deviation from a
rule. In English, we normally add an 's' to make a noun plural. "The team" (singular)
becomes "the teams" (plural, with an s added). Words like "woman" have a plural form of
"women". Words like "person" have a plural form of "people".
English verbs normally are shown in the past tense by the addition of "ed".
"To walk" in the past is "walked". Similarly to nouns, verbs have irregular forms, like
"to eat" . To describe eating in the past you use "eaten" or "ate".
The program displays both the base form (person), its grammatical use (noun), and its
actual use (people) for comparison.
Verb phrase matching
A phrase is one of the key elements of a language. While words tend to be ambiguous,
phrases are less so. Verbs tend to have a number of phrase forms - in English there
are hundreds which are used to describe the "time and tense" in which they are used.
"Has been watched" is just another form of the verb "to watch".
The program displays the base form of the verb, such as "to watch", along with its
actual use like "was being watched". Information regarding the time and tense is shown
in addition.
Noun phrase matching
Nouns also can have quite complex forms. The first part of a noun phrase starts with
determiners - you may learn more about these later. Words like "the", "her" and "an" are
determiners which start a noun phrase. For example, "the very old red school bus" is a
noun phrase.
The program displays the main noun "bus", along with the additional attributes
(this is definite, with a colour and age). The program enforces the English rules of
order regarding noun phrases (certain adjectives must come before others to support
phrase generation. This is because the phrase "the red very old school bus" doesn't
make sense to most native speakers, so should not be used.
More noun phrase matching
If you thought there was enough, you were wrong. Nouns can also have phrases added
onto the end to provide more information about them. Information about the time, place,
and associated actions are all a part of the noun itself. "The very old red school bus
on Monday at 11:30am in Italy" is a noun phrase. The noun is still "bus".
The program shows the noun phrase with its base noun and other attributes on
the screen.
Clause matching
Clauses seem to be at the heart of communications. They are the focal point
of the program. The relationship between words in a sentence depends on our
selection of the clause's subject and verb.
Simple subject, verb, subject complement sentences
OK, so these examples may be becoming a bit technical. Don't worry, as once
you have seen the program display the relationships between the words, it will
make a lot more sense. One of these sentence types looks like: "The clever
Italian women seem happy to be sitting." is an example.
The program displays the subject - a noun, woman; the verb - to seem; and the
subject complement: an adjective, happy. You can drill down to see the
additional detail as required.
The point of this type of sentence is that the happy relates to the women.
More complicated sentence
The English clause types include those with "causative" verbs. You are
probably familiar with them: "The young boy made his friend eat the sandwich."
The program displays the subject and object "boy" and "made". It then shows
an additional clause: "friend", "to eat", "sandwich".
You probably get the idea now without seeing the myriad examples that help
run a student through the different types of phrases we use in language.
But wait, there's more!
OK, not to labour the point too much, English has a number of variations that
are worth touching on here, as students will want to gain a greater appreciation
of them in the controlled environment of a study program. The samples shown
above are only the tip of an iceberg that is the English language.
Consider these examples [shown in quotes]. We can use verbs as nouns:
(in gerund phrases - "running the race" is exhausting)
(in infinitive phrases - "not to have been running the race from the start"
is upsetting)
And nouns as verbs: (I want to have "a run").
Summary of functions
The program is designed to take your text, find any clauses within it, and
display it on the screen for you. You can then drill down into the sentence to
look at its type, its construction, elements and so forth. By doing this in a
controlled way, a student will more quickly recognise the elements involved in
language and exercises can be coordinated between the student and teacher to
rapidly develop expertise in the language.