PERSON: English Has Three Persons (1, 2, 3)

Person: English has three persons (1, 2, 3).

SING PLUR

First person: I we

Second person: You You (all)

Third person: He/she/it They

EXERCISE: Determine if each subject is first, second, or third person and whether it is singular or plural.

This is a murder mystery novel.

Then the police arrived. I like the police.

And why were you holding the dog?

What in fuck’s name have you done to my dog?

I had been hugging the dog for four minutes when I heard screaming.

She was wearing pajamas and a housecoat.

The verb “be” A highly irregular verb that can be used as either a lexical verb or an auxiliary.

Compare with the verb “walk” (a highly regular verb).

Base form of BE: BE

Base form of WALK: WALK

Inflected forms of BE: - s form: is; past tense: was/were; past participle: been; present participle: being.

Inflected forms of WALK: - s form: walks; past tense: walked; past participle walked; present participle: walking.

Present tense of BE (all three persons):

I am we are

You are you (all) are

He/she/it is They are

Present tense of WALK (all three persons):

I walk we walk

You walk you (all) walk

He/she/it walks They walk

Past tense of BE (all three persons):

I was we were

You were you (all) were

He/she/it was They were

Past tense of WALK (all three persons):

I walked we walked

You walked you (all) walked

He/she/it walked They walked

APPLICATION EXERCISE:

These are all sentences pulled from student papers. They all show problems with verbs. These problems can be sorted into categories:

Subject-verb agreement; tense; missing lexical verbs; incorrect inflected forms;

Sometimes when I speak English I feel that I am special and I done a great thing, but when I go to classes in WSU I understand just 40% of what the teacher saying and that so bad.

That not only in the class.

After that, when I graduate from high school, I got a scholarship to the USA to get my bachelor’s degree.

Children learns spoken language as a part of growing up.

Deaf parents has trouble with raising their children.

As soon as I get into third grade, I basically got the basic knowledge and understanding of Mandarin that I have up till this day.

I speaks two different languages, Korean and English.

When I first came here, all American food was oily. I couldn’t get up from the couch because my stomach hurts like crazy.

I start to learn English when I was 8 years old.

At that time I really excited about going to America.

One time I had trouble with my professor. I wanted to explain what happen and what I feel about her.

I have seldom speak English to my friends.

English much easier than Russian.

The whole world speak English

Auxiliaries: verbs that are part of the verb phrase but are not the lexical verb. They come before (to the left) of the lexical verb. They help the verb to perform operations (such as becoming negative or turning into a question) and so they have the property of being operators. Auxiliaries have other important characteristics. The first auxiliary in a verb phrase is the verb that shows the tense (either present or past) and it is the verb that agrees with the subject in the present. Finally, another important characteristic of auxiliaries is that there are a limited number of them: do, be, have and the modal auxiliaries can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might.

Exercise: Find the auxiliaries in the following passage taken from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (not all sentences have verb phrases with auxiliaries)

Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the pictures and he said he believed they were real. But he was being stupid too, because if you look at the pictures you can see the fairies look just like fairies in old books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes. In 1981 Joe Cooper interviewed Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths for an article in a magazine. Elsie Wright said all 5 photographs had been faked and Frances Griffiths said four had been faked but one was real. And they said Elsie had drawn the fairies from a book. And this shows the sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. And it shows that Occam’s razor is true. Occam’s razor is not a razor but a law, and it says: No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary. This means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone who knows them and fairies are made out of paper and you can’t talk to a dead person.