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In both British and American English, a person can make a decision; however, only in British English is the common variant take a decision also an option in a formal, serious, or official context. [38] The British often describe a person as tanned, where Americans would use tan. For instance, "she was tanned", rather than "she was tan". [39]
The English language allows a wide variety of expressions of combinations of tense, aspect, and mood, with a variety of grammatical constructions. These constructions involve pure morphological changes (suffixes and internal sound changes of the verb), conjugated compound verbs , and invariant auxiliaries.
Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber ...
For example, the same set of chairs can be referred to as "seven chairs" (count) and as "furniture" (mass); the Middle English mass noun pease has become the count noun pea by morphological reanalysis; "vegetables" are a plural count form, while the British English slang synonym "veg" is a mass noun.
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
In linguistics, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure [1] which modifies the meaning of another element in the structure. For instance, the adjective "red" acts as a modifier in the noun phrase "red ball", providing extra details about which particular ball is being referred to.