How Nouns are Used
Before we can fully use the verbs that we learned on the previous two pages, we have do a quick review of English grammar. There are three basic uses of nouns in a sentence:
- Subject
-
The person or thing that does the action.
In English, the subject is usually at the beginning
of the sentence. In these
sentences, the subject is in bold:
Fred buys the pencil.
The cat chases the mouse. - Object
-
The person or thing that is acted on.
In English, the subject is usually at the end
of the sentence. In these
sentences, the object is in italics:
Fred buys the pencil.
The cat chases the mouse. - Possessive
-
Shows ownership. In English, we usually
use an apostrophe and the letter s to show ownership. The
possessive is underlined in the following sentences:
That is Fred’s pencil.
The cat’s eyes are green.
As you can see, we primarily use word order to give us clues about subject and object. “The cat chases the mouse” is NOT the same as “The mouse chases the cat.” For possessive, we use an extra marking to help show how a word is used.
How does Greek do it?
| << Practice First Conjugation | Grammar Index | Case >> |