Words and sentences Author:Alfred Marshall Hitchcock Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II A BRIEF REVIEW OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR Words are but feeble things except when properly arranged in groups and set to work. They resemble in this respe... more »ct the parts of a machine, a typewriter for instance, which must be assembled with care, each part properly fitted in its place, before the machine becomes serviceable. The dictionary, which we may call first of the great law-books of language, considers words singly, telling what each one means, how it should be spelled, how pronounced. Grammar, correctly speaking, includes all, or nearly all, that the average dictionary contains. As the term is commonly employed, however, the special province of grammar is to record what is good usage among language-respecting people as regards words when grouped for service—what forms they take and how they are arranged. It may well be called the second great law-book. The following review is much too brief to be complete. It touches but lightly upon many things and passes by othersaltogether, the purpose being merely to freshen the memory in regard to such matters as are of real importance to one who is trying to learn to speak and write correctly. The simplest complete word-group, it will be recalled, is the sentence, with its two vital parts, subject and predicate. The former names that concerning which the sentence tells something; the latter is the part which does the telling. There are four kinds of sentences: the declarative, used in making an assertion; the interrogative, used in asking a question; the imperative, used in entreating, commanding, and in giving directions; the exclamatory, used in expressing deep feeling. Declarative: The tide has turned. Interrogative: Has the tide turned? Imperative: Seek the truth. Exclamatory: How gallantly they ride! Another...« less