Table of Content

1. The Study of Grammar: An Overview

2. Sentence Patterns
3. Expanding the Main Verb
4. Transforming the Basic Patterns

5. Modifiers of the Verb: Adverbials
6. Modifiers of the Noun: Adjectivals
7. The Noun Phrase Functions: Nominals
8. Sentence Modifiers
9. Coordination
10. Morphemes
11. The Form Classes
12. The Structure Classes
13. Pronouns

14. Rhetorical Grammar
15. Purposeful Punctuation

Salient Features

• Organization is from whole to part. After an opening chapter that touches on the history of classroom grammar and other language issues, Chapter 2 presents ten basic sentence patterns with their various slots described according to both form and function.
• Words and Phrases: An Overview. This useful overview opens Chapter 2 and provides a quick review of (or introduction to) nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases and introduces the concepts of noun phrase and verb phrase in clear, jargon-free language, including helpful ways for students to make use of their internal language expertise.
• Instruction is clear and accessible. Sentence expansions in Chapters 3-9 provide readers with a structure, a framework, on which to organize the new concepts learned.
• Traditional diagrams illustrate the patterns and their expansions. The diagram is used as a tool to help students recognize the structural relationship of the various sentence structures and provide a visual framework for the sentence patterns and their expansions.
• The word classes, described in detail in Part IV, are based on the structural linguists’ division of form and structure classes, rather than the Latin-based eight parts of speech.