English fascinated me from childhood. It was my passion and quest to feel the veins and pulses of English Language – its grammar and usage, makings and breakings, forms and functions, moods and modes, tone and rhythm, morph and phone, style and diction, structures and figures, prosody and rhetories, language and literature.
Though arbitrary like all languages and grammars, English is the most lucid, placid and openminded of all languages, that has made it a world class language and lingua franca.
As a teacher of English for thirty-three years and principal for 16 years in KVS and NVS, a participant, resource person, associate director and director in many English Language Teaching courses of regional, national and international platforms, I thought I should put on record all my studies, feelings, findings and representations of grammar and usage, linguistic and literary aspects, phonetics and communication skills in the form of an ‘all-in-one’ book for the greater and broader benefits of all the students and teachers from high school to university levels across the globe. Thus, this book was born.
There have been conflicts between the traditional and modern school of English grammar, which can be easily sorted out by simple correlation and reconciliation, corrections and modifications time to time in the course of growth and evolution of language and grammar. In this book, my mission and vision has been to build up a balanced approach taking both the schools hand in hand.
This book, as a text book and a reference book too, has been deliberately devised with graded learning and doing materials for very effective benefit of the students and teachers from high school to university level. The students with English Elective and Honours in the graduation level and post graduate students with English Literature, Linguistics and Phonetics will be immensely benefitted by this book. The basic as well as the advanced aspects and concepts in different areas of grammar, usage, composition, linguistic and literary aspects, phonetics and communication skills have been discussed intensively and exhaustively with highly motivating and knowledge-enriching exercises of varied types. Apart from being beneficial to the students and teachers in the school, college and universities in India and abroad, this book will be of great help to the aspirants of different competitive examinations like UGC-NET, CAT, MBA, GRE, GMAT, AFCAT, SSB, CDS, SSC, CLAT, TOEFL, IELTS, Banking examinations, Civil Service Examinations, other UPSC examinations, State level Administrative examinations and all other competitive examinations.
Contents –
1. Introduction
2. Form, Function and Meaning
3. Basic Language Skills (LSRW)
4. Vocabulary
5. Word
6. Types of Words
7. Some Common Specific Usages of Words
8. Declension-Functional Classification of Words
9. Noun or Noun Phrase (Qualitative Division or Kinds of Noun)
10. Number (Quantitative Division of Noun or Noun Phrase)
11. Gender of Noun
12. Person of Noun (Personal Pronouns and Their Grammatical Persons)
13. Declension: Functions of Noun in Different Cases (Functional Classification of Noun)
14. Concord or Conjugation (Agreement of Subject-verb, Number, Gender and Person)
15. Pronoun: Functional Classification
16. Adjective: Functional Classification and Usage
17. Adjective of Degree of Comparison
18. Determiners
19. Pre-determiner, Mid-determiner or Central Determiner and Post-determiners
20. Verb or Verb Phrase
21. Phrasal Verbs (With Wide Range of Synonyms)
22. Finite and Non-finite Verb
23. Transitive Verb or Object-carrying Verb
24. Other Categories of Verbs
25. Auxiliary Verbs (Be, Have, Do and Modals)
26. Question Tag or Tag Question
27. Adverb
28. Prepositions
29. Conjunction (Connector or Combinator)
30. Interjections
31. Word Formation
32. Prefixes: Segments Added to Front of Root and Stem Word (‘Adya-Pratyaya’ in Sanskrit)
33. Suffixes: Segments Added to End of Root and Stem Word (‘Antah-Pratyaya’ in Sanskrit)
34. Root or Nucleus Words
35. Phrase Compound Word, Hybrid Word Formation
36. Clause Analysis
37. Sentence Analysis
38. Types of Sentence
39. Synthesis
40. Mood (Moods of Verb in Sentence)
41. Syntax and Semantics
42. Basic and Deep Structures
43. Graded Structures for Systematic Language Acquistition of the Learners of Elementary and Middle Classes
44. Tense: Concept of Tense and Time
45. Functions of Modal Auxiliaries
