Specifically: I was upset. I am angry. I am wholefully beholden.
Where does noun, verb, adverb, bridge fit into these?
Bonus question: Can someone point me to a resource to further enlighten me.
Translation: Done speak. Speak Good. Not understand speak.
In your sentences, “I” is a personal pronoun acting as the subject of the sentence; “was/am” are verbs (conjugated forms of the verb “to be”) acting as the predicate of the sentence; and “upset/angry/beholden” are predicative adjectives. “Woefully” is, in the sentence it appears in, an adverb modifying “beholden”.
To be more specific, “to be” (and “is”) is a “copulative verb”.
Verbs are usually transitive and pass action onto the object of the sentence - or intransitive, and do not pass their action. (We won’t get into active and passive voice).
“I hit Billy” - transitive, Billy realizes he is receiving the action of the verb to hit.
“I floated under the sunny sky”. Float doesn’t pass an action on to another object.
Copulative verbs simply connect an adjective with the subject.
I was upset. Upset (adjective) describes I
I am angry. Ditto - I is getting a lot of different adjectival description.
I am wholefully beholden. Now I is getting clever. beholden is an adjective describing I and wholefully is an adverb the modifies beholden. (Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.)
(I too speak wholefully good. Me was on receiving end of 4-plus years of intensive grammar in … wait for it… grammar school.)
But — “I floated the toy boat in the tub” is different.
English is wacky.
Chapter 2 of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Quirk et al., has an outline of the main concepts and categories.
Yes. In the first case, “I floated” is intransitive because the subject is floating. In the latter case, the subject “I” is making the boat float. (Whatever floats your boat)
Indeed, in various ways, but the same grammatical concepts and terms apply in all the major European language groups.
I assume most languages have “overloaded” words, where the same word can mean multiple things -
“Bank” for example can be the edge of a river or similar raised line of earth; or a place to put money; or a verb meaning to tilt, usually during a turn, or to rely (“you can bank on that”) etc. Where things get interesting in translations is that sometimes these word meanings have different translation in a different language. For example, IIRC, playing an game and playing a musical instrument are two different unrelated words in Spanish.
(Another example, Putin allegdly once called Trump “brilliant”. That can mean “very smart” in English, but apparently the Russian word he used more usually translated as “brilliant” as in “colourful”, as in “Mister Trump is a colourful character.” )
There are many verbs in English that have both transitive and intransitive senses, with closely related but different meanings, as in this case.
Very much so.
In that sentence “toy” is an adjective modifying boat.
But if you drop the word “boat” and say
“I floated the toy in the tub”
then “toy” suddenly becomes a noun.
Context is everything.
Such words are called homophones and false friends, respectively.
I think this means that it screws around a lot.
Reminds me of the old joke:
Why is Latin an extinct language? - The verbs wanted to conjugate, but the nouns declined.
Yes, we learned this grammar by grade 7, but later in high school the term “copulative” was never mentioned.
English is an incredibly flexible language. For example, we can verbify any noun.
For any questions about English structure, grammar, etc., I heartily recommend Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition. It’s helped me out on many occasions.
Technically, the word toy is still a noun, but it is described as a noun used attributively (meaning, essentially, as an adjective). There is a phonetic difference (usually). When a noun is used attributively, it is usually stressed over the modified noun. In an adjective/noun phrase, the noun is usually stressed. Consider the (actually factual) sentence: The brown building on the McGill campus is that Brown building.
Or consider the difference in meaning between the phrases French teacher and French teacher. Curiously, French is actually an adjective. But in the phrase French teacher, it is an adjective used substantively (that is, as noun) but used attributively (that is as a noun used adjectively). Grammar isn’t simple.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
I never heard that distinction. If a word is “used as an adjective” it is considered an adjective.
“This is where they teach French.”
French in this case is a noun.
Someone once said to me that statistics is basically torturing number so they tell you what you want. The same can be said of language. You can torture words so that they tell what you want to hear. English is just more flexible than some, so has to be tortured harder.
I’ve heard the terms “adjectival nouns” and “noun adjuncts” for this use of a noun attributively modifying another noun. But they are still nouns, as can be seen in cases where an actual adjective exists for this noun but isn’t used in that context. A history teacher is a history teacher, not a historical teacher, even though the adjective “historical” corresponding to the noun “history” exists. Easily irritable people might attend anger therapy, but not angry therapy.
Although, as a native speaker of German, I’ve always intuitively understood these noun adjuncts as the English variant of the formation of compound nouns, which are very common in German.
Yes, as I said, English can verbify nouns, so there’s no reason we can’t adjectivize them too. What part of speech they are depends on context. Anger therapy and angry therapy are two different things, thus the divergent verbiage. French teacher - from France, and French teacher - of French are two different things with ambiguous wording. Maybe the Germans are simply smarter - at least, when it comes to language. But then, a lot of English oddity seems to relate to a tolerace of ommitted or “implied” wording.
“French teacher” can be short for “teacher of French”. English speakers just get lazy> As I understand, French for example generally does not accept such shortcuts, but then typically the French translation on Canadian signs is significantly longer than the English version.
Our grade 7 teacher had us parse each word in the sentence “‘The’ is an article”.
In this instance, “the” was a noun, subject of the sentence. Gotcha!! Another tortured word. Or maybe it’s simply non-binary.