from the grammar described here occur in some dialects of English. This article describes a
generalized present-day Standard English, the form of speech and writing found in types of
public discourse including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news
including both formal and informal speech.

There are differences in grammar between the standard forms of British, American,

and Australian English, although these are minor compared with the differences
in vocabulary and pronunciation.

Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-

European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English
retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more
extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and
articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the
"Saxon genitive" (

-'s

Eight "word classes" or "parts of speech" are commonly distinguished in

English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,
and conjunctions. Nouns form the largest English word class, with verbs being the second
largest word class. Unlike many Indo-European languages, English nouns do not
have grammatical gender (although many nouns refer specifically to male or female
persons or animals).

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes – word classes that readily

accept new members, such as the noun

celebutante

(a celebrity who frequents the fashion

circles), similar relatively new words. The others are considered to be closed classes. For
example, it is rare for a new pronoun to enter the language.

Determiners, traditionally classified along with adjectives, have not always been

regarded as a separate part of speech. Interjections are another word class, but these are not
described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the
language.

[2]

English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to

tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to except, to some extent, in the case of
words with inflectional endings or derivational suffixes. On the other hand, some words
belong to more than one word class. For example,

run

can serve as either a verb or a noun

(these are regarded as two different lexemes).

Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The

lexeme

run

has the forms

runs

ran

runny

runner

, and

running

. Words in one class can

sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new
words. The noun

aerobics

has recently given rise to the adjective

aerobicized

Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a

word from some particular word class. For example,

my very good friend Peter

is a phrase

that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase.
Similarly, adjective phrases and adverb phrases function as if they were adjectives or