UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE

FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES
ESCUELA DE CIENCIAS DEL LENGUAJE
LECTURA DE TEXTOS ACADÉMICOS EN INGLÉS

English Grammar Review

What you need to know
(or should already know)

Luis A. Saldarriaga B.
English teacher (ESP)
luis.saldarriaga@correounivalle.edu.co
 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
• Nouns (and pronouns)
• Adjectives
• Verbs
• Adverbs
• Prepositions
• Determiners
• Conjunctions
 Nouns (and pronouns)
• Nouns can be persons, living beings, objects,
ideas (simple or complex): Albert, eternity, an
iPad, 333 trees, fungi, our sins, cloning.
• In Spanish, you know it is a noun if you can use
an article before it, but this is not always the
case in English: the Spanish vs. Spanish.
• A pronoun is a reference word for a noun, so it
replaces a noun: you, them, us, it, whom.
 Pronouns
Pronouns Examples
Subject pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we,
they, who.
Object pronouns Me, you, him, her, it, us,
them, whom.
Possessive adjectives My, your, his, her, its, our,
their, whose.
Possessive pronouns Mine, yours, his, hers,
ours, theirs, whose.
Demonstrative pronouns This, that, these, those.
 Adjectives
• Adjectives describe nouns. They give
additional information like color (red tides),
shape (a round bacterium), size (dwarf stars),
monetary value (his costly decision), etc.
• Adjectives usually appear before nouns: The
most deadly infectious diseases in 1990 were
lower respiratory infections and diarrheal
illness—including amoebic dysentery.
 Verbs
• Verbs tell what nouns do (or don’t do), what
happens to them.
• Verbal forms: infinitive, past, past participle.
• Tenses: present, past, future (simple and
progressive).
• Present perfect tense.
• Past perfect tense.
• Passive voice / Modal verbs.
 Adverbs
• Adverbs describe verbs, they tell us how
things happen: globular proteins are only
marginally stable.
• There are adverbs of manner (clearly, only),
frequency (never, often), time (early, now)
and place (here, abroad): Haemophilus
influenzae was mistakenly (mode) considered
to be the cause of influenza until (time) 1933.
 Prepositions
• Prepositions show how nouns (or pronouns)
relate one another. They show relations
among nouns (or pronouns), and usually
appear before them.
• They may indicate place (the ivy grows around
trees, the ladder stood against the wall), time
(meetings are not in the morning but at noon),
or give additional information (a book about
blood smear with clear images).
Prepositions of place
Prepositions of place
Prepositions of place
 Prepositions
• After, against, around, at, before, between,
by, down, during, except, for, from, in (into),
inside, of, off, on (onto), over, to, toward
(towards), until, with, without.
• Into: indicates that something moves inside
something else.
• Onto: indicates that something is located on
something else, or moves towards it.
Prepositions of place
 Woman crashes through airport
fence onto runway
• A mentally unstable woman drove her car
through the fence and into the runway area at
Kalaeloa Airport last month. The woman
started driving in the direction of a jet that
was taxiing on the Kalaeloa taxiway.
• A private security guard from the company
Securitas got into his security truck and chased
her down (along her way), using his truck to
block her vehicle from driving toward the jet.
Prepositions
 Determiners
• Determiners are words or expressions that
establish and set limits to a noun. They give
context to a noun.
• A determiner can be an article (a, an, the), a
demonstrative word (this, that, these, those), a
possessive adjective (my, your, his, her, its, our,
their), a numeral (twelve, twenty), an ordinal
number (first, fifth), or a quantifier (any, some,
many, much, a lot of them).
 Conjunctions
• Conjunctions link words or ideas.
• Coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor,
or, so, yet) may join two related elements
(words, sentences or ideas).
• She studied all night long, for she has a quiz
this afternoon. Yet she doesn’t feel tired or
drowsy so she expects to get a good grade and
then go partying tonight.
 Coordinating Conjunctions

According to a new study, skipping breakfast

may increase the risk of heart disease. But the
study has some limitations: For one, it’s
important to note that it’s not just when you
eat, but what you eat. And breakfast is only one
of many factors associated with a stronger
ticker. So it’s not as simple as eating breakfast to
lower the risk of heart disease.
 Sentences
• Sentences express complete ideas. A sentence
always has a subject (a noun) and a predicate
(a verb) in its simplest form, but sometimes
you need another noun after the verb:
• Dogs bark. (That’s what they usually do.)
• Bats eat fruits. (That’s what they usually eat.)
• Researchers are working. (That’s what they do
now.) Researchers are working in the lab.
 Object pronouns
• Object pronouns receive the action of a verb,
they are the object of the verb. Object
pronouns are also used after prepositions.
• A baby alligator cannot hunt. Mother alligator
has to nurture it (that baby alligator).
• The fact that millions of people are infected
with HIV must be a concern to us (we must be
concerned about that fact).
 Object pronouns
• Psychotherapy can help a man with panic
disorder to relieve him.
• Prevention decreases the chance that a woman
gets cervical cancer in her lifetime.
• A Geologist talked about the earth's crust
plates, and the secrets below them.
• Medication can help women with panic disorder
to deal with it (to handle panic disorder).
 Sentences and Noun phrases
• A sentence always has a subject (a noun) and
a predicate (a verb).
• And sometimes you also need another noun
after the verb.
• But in a more strict sense, we can say that a
sentence is composed by a noun phrase
(subject) and a verb phrase (predicate).
 Sentences and Noun phrases
Sentence = Noun + Verb
Sentence = Noun (subject) + Verb
The train has arrived.

Sentence = Noun + Verb + Noun

Sentence = Noun (subject) + Verb + Noun (object)
Liabilities are debts.
 References
• Seaton A., Mew Y. H: Basic English Grammar
for English Language Learners. Book 1. (2007)
• King C., Stanley N: Building skills for the TOEFL
test. (1996)
• Bailey S: Academic Writing. A Handbook for
International Students. (2006)
• Peat J: SCIENTIFIC WRITING - Easy When You
Know How. BMJ (2002)