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Inglês Técnico

Objetivos:
Compreender a gramática Inglesa.
As partes do discurso.
O trabalho das palavras nas frases na língua Inglesa.

EXERCÍCIOS

Look at the dictionaries (links below) to help you answer to the questions:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/
https://www.dictionary.com/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/

Activity 1 - The Hangman

Grammar rule #1

EACH CLAUSE IN YOUR SENTENCE

SHOULD HAVE ONE SUBJECT
AND ONE MAIN VERB, and only one subject and one main verb.
Activity 2
Consider the following string of words. How many sentences can you come up with using these
words and only these words?
 the came girl baskets home with

- The girl came home with baskets.

Most native speakers, using only their intuitive knowledge of grammar, will come up with this
sentence. What native speakers do is use their innate knowledge of grammar to put this
seemingly random string of words into a comprehensible sentence.
Any other combination of words would produce sentences that would sound strange to English
speakers because they would not be grammatical; that is, they would not fit the blueprint of how
words are combined in English to make sentences.

Activity 3 - Introduction to Parts of Speech (Word Classes)

Words perform different functions in a sentence.

Look at the following words:

system in big communicate
between confidentiality relevant rebellion
obey under shatter blizzard
warn happy beside weary

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Create four columns. Label these columns Group A, Group B, Group C, and Group D. Use a
dictionary or other reference tool, try to place the words that you think belong together in the different
columns. The first four words have already been done for you as an example.

Group A Group B Group C Group D

(nouns) (prepositions) (Adjective) (verbs)
system in big communicate
Confidentiality Under weary Warn
Blizzard Between Relevant Shatter
Rebellion beside happy obey

Content Words Structure Words

the words that carry the content or essential The words that serve primarily to indicate
meaning of a sentence grammatical relationships and are frequently
referred to as structure words.
Nouns Prepositions
Verbs Pronouns
Adjective Determiners
Adverbs Conjunctions
Interjection

My sister and me/I / went / to school…

Mary and John / gave / a present / to my sister and me/I

a) After you have categorised as many words together as you can, explain why you grouped them
as you did.

b) Now make two new columns, Group A and Group B. Using the new list of words below, try to
place the different words that you think belong together. As you group this new list of words,
consider whether any of the words can belong to more than one group. Try to explain why or
why not.

harm remind cancer cup scream date

struggle queen poison announce style write

Group A represents words that are Group B represents words that are
nouns verbs.
harm harm
remind
cancer
cup cup
scream scream
date date
struggle struggle
queen
poison poison

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announce
style style
write

While you may recognise that a word can fit into more than one group, you may not be able to do so
without thinking of a sentence or context for that particular word.
In English, the group or class to which a word belongs is not always obvious without context, as
you probably realised when doing this Activity.
The form of a word in English does not necessarily determine its function. Unlike many other
languages, English does not always rely on word endings or word forms to determine word class.

Words need to occur in a certain order to be grammatical. Because word

order is highly fixed, context and sentence position are key to clarifying the
function of a word or phrase.
Activity 4 - Context and Function
How are the sentence position of a word and its function related?
The following sentences illustrate the importance of context in assigning function and/or class. In
both sentences, you can see that the same word in different contexts has a different function:

 She made a wish on a star.

 They wish to learn more about effective research practices.

In the first sentence, wish is a noun, while in the second sentence, wish is a verb.

Activity 2: Look at the following groups of sentences.

Group 1
 The broccoli can be found in the produce aisle. (noun)
 These companies produce 100,000 shirts per year. (verb)

Group 2
 I present many speeches. action word (verb) referring to what I (the subject) is doing
 I gave her a nice present. a “thing” (noun)
 The students are all present. describing something (adjective) about the students

‘produce’ and ‘present’ have the same form but don’t have the same function in the sentences.
 Explain the use of produce and present in these sentences.
There are some words in English where the verb and the noun are the same exact word with the same
spelling. Although some words are spelled the same, there is a difference in their pronunciation.

The rule is: When there is a pair of words where the verb, the noun or the adjective are spelled the
same, you can distinguish the words by shifting the syllable stress:
For the noun or adjective, the stress is on the first syllable.
For the verb, the stress is on the second syllable.

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(when you stress the second syllable on the verb, you must de-stress the first syllable
down to a shwa(ə), to prepare for the strong stress syllable /prəˈdjuːs/.

Now practice. Identify the functions of the pair of words and the stressed syllables.

 We’re in contract negotiations right now. (noun)

 He likes to contract his muscles to show off how big they are. (verb)

 He got his learner’s permit as soon as he turned 16. (noun)

 I can’t permit you to do that. (verb)

 There is so much conflict in this world. noun

 This conflicts with my priorities in life. verb

 This project is set to wrap up early next year. noun

 This machine projects the image onto the wall. Verb

Activity 5 - English words categories

As mentioned earlier, English words fall into two main categories:
content words and structure words.
(1) form class words or major word classes, and
The major category is the larger of the two categories. This category consists of the word classes
commonly labelled nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (although not all linguists agree that
adverbs belong in the major category). These major word classes are made up of the
words that carry the content or essential meaning of a sentence. They are
often referred to as content or form words.

(2) structure class words, or minor word classes.

The minor category includes the classes generally known as prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions,
and determiners. These words serve primarily to indicate grammatical relationships
and are frequently referred to as structure words. Although there are fewer
words in the minor classes, these words are more difficult for ESL/EFL students to master.

Take a look at the following sentence:

 Victoria ate a banana at the table.

1. Can you tell how many content words and structure words are in this sentence?
This sentence consists of seven words: four content words and three
structure words.
2. Think about the order of the content words. What does it tell you?
If you saw only Victoria, ate, banana, table in that order, you could probably
make an accurate guess as to the sentence’s general meaning because these
four content words are crucial for conveying meaning.

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3. Look at the structure words. What do they show you?

The three structure words, a, at, and the, show the grammatical relationships
of the content words:
a before banana tells us Victoria ate one thing.
at tells us where Victoria ate the banana.
the specifies the thing, namely a specific table.
Drinking water / is / healthy.
This / is / drinking water.
He / is drinking / water.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Activity 6: News Headlines (Discussion)

The importance of context in understanding meaning and function.
Context lets you “know” the function of a word. Context is critical in determining meaning. Words
without context can be difficult to understand.

Newspaper headlines are famous for using short, catchy phrases with words that have different
meanings depending on context. A reader’s attention is caught by the headlines, which often play on
the different meanings of words that have the same form. The actual meanings may only become clear
after reading the articles themselves.

Look at these newspaper headlines.

1. Underline the words you find ambiguous, that is, words that have more than one meaning.
2. Explain what these different meanings are.

(a) Students Cook and Serve Grandparents

(b) British Left Waffles on Gibraltar
(c) Truck Carrying Fruit Crashes, Creates Jam

Activity 7 - Prepositions and Grammatical Relationships

The following pairs of headlines have different meanings.

 Explain how the inclusion or omission of a preposition changes the meaning of each pair of
sentences.
 Consider what this tells us about prepositions and grammatical relationships.

Political Headlines:
1(a) Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
1(b) Head of Iraq Seeks Arms

Agriculture Headlines:
2(a) Angry Bull Injures Farmer with Axe
2(b) Angry Bull Injures Farmer Axe

Headline News:

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3(a) Man Struck by Speeding Car

3(b) Man Struck Speeding Car

Local News:
4(a) Police Help Fire Chief
4(b) Police Help to Fire Chief

As you see in this Activity:

 The inclusion or omission of a preposition in the headlines alters the
meaning.
 The activity illustrates the importance of the role of structure words in
establishing grammatical relationships.
 This role grows even more important as the complexity of a sentence
increases.

They are among the most common and frequently used English words. These words are
considered “structure words” for several reasons.
First, they consist of small numbers of words that change very little over long periods
of time and that have been in the English language for centuries.
They include:
• prepositions (e.g., in, on, at, of, from)
• determiners (e.g., a, an, the, this, that, these, those)
• coordinators (e.g., and, but, or)
• pronouns (e.g., it, his, you, them, mine, herself)

Second, structure words are fixed and invariant, meaning that they do not have other
forms.
There is only one form for the preposition in.
In contrast, open class words can have different forms because they can take different
endings.
- The noun, dog, for instance, can take the plural and possessive endings (dogs or
dog’s);
- the verb walk can take three different endings (walked, walks, walking);
- and the adjective tall can take two different endings (taller, tallest).

Third,
these words occur only in a narrow range of possible positions within a sentence, and
they must always accompany content words. There is no flexibility in word order.
- The must always precede a noun. It cannot follow a noun. We cannot say dog the but
must say the dog.
Finally, the job of structure words is to show the relationships between the different
parts of sentences.
What does it mean to say,
“to show the relationships between the different parts of sentences”?
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If we say, for example, I went to the store, this sentence has a different meaning than if
we say, I went by the store.
The only difference between the two sentences is the change of prepositions from to to
by, but it is these words (prepositions) that indicate a difference in the relationship
between I went and the store.
Because English depends on word order to show grammatical relationships, these
structure words are essential sentence elements.

Activity 8 - Parts of Speech (Word Classes)

When students learn a new word, one of the things they need to know is what grammatical category it
is in. There are nine main parts of speech in English:

 Verbs
 Nouns
 Adjectives
 Adverbs
 Pronouns
 Prepositions
 Conjunctions
 Determiners
 Interjections

It's quite important to recognise parts of speech. The part of speech to which a word belongs guides its
use in a sentence and defines the correct word order and punctuation. Knowing the role that each
word has in a sentence structure clearly helps to understand sentences, and also to construct them
properly.

Identify the Parts of speech (word classes)

Complete the table with the sentences/words given below. The first part of speech (verb) has already
been done for you as an example.

part of function or
speech "job" example words example sentences
Verb action or state (to) be, have, EnglishClub is a web site.
do, like, work, I like EnglishClub.
sing, can, must
Noun thing or person pen, dog, work, This is my dog. He lives in
music, town, my house. We live in London.
London,
teacher, John
Adjective describes a good, big, red, My dogs are big. I like big dogs.
noun well, interesting

Adverb describes a quickly, My dog eats quickly. When he

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verb, adjective silently, well, is very hungry, he eats really

or adverb badly, very, quickly.
really

Determine limits or a/an, the, 2, I have two dogs and some rabbits.
r "determines" a some, many
noun

Pronoun replaces a I, you, he, she, Tara is Indian. She is beautiful.

noun some

Prepositio links a noun to to, at, after, on, We went to school on Monday.
n another word but

Conjunctio joins clauses and, but, when I like dogs and I like cats. I like
n or sentences or cats and dogs. I like dogs but I
words don't like cats
.

Interjectio short oh!, ouch!, hi!, Ouch! That hurts! Hi! How are
n exclamation, well you? Well, I don't know.
sometimes
inserted into a
sentence

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