Tag Archives: Nouns

Lists, Pairs, Nouns & Names

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Verb chains are a means of placing multiple ideas into the same term by stringing together infinitives and gerunds. The equivalent structures for nouns and pronouns are lists and pairs. These are composite grammatical structures that can be used wherever a single noun, pronoun or name can be used. A noun or pronoun refers to only one entity whereas a pair refers to two entities and a list refers to multiple entities.

There are no restrictions with regard to the use of pairs, lists, nouns and names. They can be used as both the subject and complement with a copula, as the subject with an intransitive verb, as the subject, direct object and indirect object with a transitive verb and in a prepositional phrase as part of an adverbial component.

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Non-finite verb forms

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Verbs come in both finite and non-finite forms.

A finite verb is the necessary component of every meaningful statement. Finite verbs are inflected to adapt to the grammatical subject. It is this bond between a single grammatical subject and a single finite verb that is the basic building block around which a statement is constructed. Finite verbs are analysed in section 6 below.

There are three non-finite forms, infinitives and present and past participles. The non-finite forms of a verb don’t adapt to the grammatical subject but do change to reflect the grammatical aspect and, in the case of transitive verbs, the grammatical voice. Infinitives, infinitives with past participles, and present participles in the form of gerunds can all function as noun-terms. These are analysed in section 5 below.

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Statement structure

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A grammatical clause expresses a single complete idea. A grammatical sentence can either be a single clause or multiple clauses connected together by some linking mechanism. This means that a sequence of ideas can be expressed either by forming multiple sentences or by joining multiple clauses into a single sentence. The difference is largely a matter of style rather than grammar. For that reason, in these notes, I will refer to both sentences and clauses as statements.

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