Nouns form the largest word class, and verbs the second-largest. Įight 'word classes' or 'parts of speech' are commonly distinguished in English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the ' Saxon genitive or English possessive' ( -'s). The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some historical, social, cultural, and regional varieties of English, although these are more minor than differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English – a form of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of registers, from formal to informal. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts. English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language.
