I have always known about this sentence structure, but I never knew the name “transitive” and “intransitive”. The most important thing I learned through this lesson is the acronyms of the order of a sentence for transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs. For example, S-Vi means subject-verb intransitive, therefore I know which form the verb is when the sentences follows this structure. The transitive verbs still confuse me a bit. The phrase “direct object” throws me off a tad due to the fact that saying noun or pronoun would be easier. Linking verbs, for me are the easiest because an adjective is all that is needed after the verb. Plus I like the example, “this beer smells funny,” it makes me giggle.
Prepositional phrases have been part of my learning since middle school. I can remember sitting in 8th grade English and being taught prep phrases and not understanding them at all. The airplane example with the cloud helped me a lot. The airplane goes “through” the cloud, “around” the cloud, “at” the cloud, “by” the cloud and although “of” and “will” do not work with the cloud, they are still prepositions.
I am continuing to read newspapers more critically, nit picking each and every sentence. I still tend to stumble when it comes to determining transitive and intransitive, so I believe more practice should be at hand for me.
Pronouns I have not had problems with. Just being able to say the sentence and know which word, “myself,” “himself,” “themselves,” etc. helps me to determine which word is correct. Although spell check on the computer has caught me a few times, I think I have figured it out well for the most part. The chart to help learn what part of speech the words referred to, such as subject case and I, you, he, she, it, objective case and me, you, him, her, it, possessive case and my, mine, your, his, her, hers, its and reflexive case and myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself helped immensely in remember what is what.
One question I do have is, in class we have discussed prepositional phrases, but are there rules and different structures for just prepositions? Or is the understanding basically the same thing?
As far as i know, and what i have found on the internet, prepositions have the fewest rules. It seems as though they are simply connector words. basically they connect nouns, pronouns, or phrases to other parts of the sentence. while there may be different structures or rules for prepositions that we did not look at i am not aware of them.
ReplyDelete