Grammar

Adjectives give extra information about nouns. They don’t have genre or number but they change their form to construct the comparative or the superalive. The difficulty of adjetives lies on the dealing with the sequence of  groups of them.

Some common suffixes that occur with adjectives are:

Conditionals describe situations that are possible, unlikely or impossible.

Determiners make the reference of nouns more specific.
There are eight classes of Determiners:

• Indefinite Article: a – an
• Definite Article: the
• Demostratives: this, that, these, those
• Possessives: my, your, his, her, its, our, their (see pronouns)
• Quantifiers: some, any, enough, no, all, both, half, double, several, much, many, more, most, few, fewer, fewest, a few, little (not much), less, least, a little. Quantifiers*
• The numbers: Ordinal & Cardinal numbers
• Distributives: Each, every, either, neither
• Exclamatives: What, such

Modal verbs express mode or mood through ability, obligation, advice, deduction, certainty, probability, speculation… and are different from other verbs…

• They are followed by an infinitive without to: I can jump
• The verb on the third-person singular doesn’t take an s: She must go
• They don’t need an auxiliary verb: She might not go. Could she drive?

Some of the most common are: can, must, might, may, could, should, ought to, would, will, shall…

VOICE

The “voice” of a verb indicates whether the subject of the sentence is doing or receiving the action.

ACTIVE VOICE

If a verb is in the active voice, the person, animal, or thing who or which performs the action is the subject of the verb.

The subject of an active clause says who or what does what the verb expresses.

• Active voice: The monkey ate the banana (doing)

PASSIVE VOICE

In the passive voice, the person, animal, or thing who or which is affected by the action is the subject of the verb.

The subject of a passive clause does not perform the action expressed by the verb but is affected by it.

• Passive voice: The banana was eaten by the monkey (receiving)

STEP BY STEP GRAMMAR STRUCTURE

TO BE + V3

To change an active sentence into a passive sentence we use the verb TO BE as an auxiliary:

The monkey ate the banana → The banana WAS eaten by the monkey 

The TENSE of the verb in the active sentence is ‘given’ to the auxiliary verb:

ATE (Past Simple) → WAS (Past Simple)

The main verb appears after the auxiliary, always in the Past Participle:

The banana was EATEN by the monkey 

THE AGENT

If the subject of the active sentence is relevant, it should be reflected in the passive sentence after the preposition BY and it is called the agent. A pronoun is never relevant.

The banana was eaten BY the monkey

Active: They drove the car → Passive: The car was driven by THEM