Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The Sentence: The Appositive


The appositive is a sentence function used when we want to repeat the subject.

The two children, Tom and Kate, went to the library.

The subject: two children; the appositive: Tom and Kate.

When we state the subject in the sentence then repeat in more detail we are using an appositive.

Mary, my neighbor, is very lovely.

The subject: Mary; the appositive:  my neighbor.

The appositive is often used with the pronouns: I, you, he, she, they, we, it, who and whoever.

Three of us from school - Ben, Daniel and I - are going out for hamburgers.
The band, we who are on stage, plays once a week.

The appositive phrase is the very similar but acts more of a description of the subject.

The two children, with dirt on their faces, went to the library.

The subject: two children; now the appositive describes them as; with dirt on their faces


It's not terribly important to know the appositive for English communication, but it is a cool grammar point to know and now you can impress your friends at your next cocktail party!

Please comment or email me your appositive examples on this blog or at chromatic.english@gmail.com.

Happy Learning!

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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

3 Phrase Diet: Keep it going!

Dear Learners,

I hope you have been sticking to your 3 phrase diet! We've been busy over here at Chromatic English and haven't been able to provide you with new phrases for a couple of weeks. It is our hope that you don't need us to provide more phrases for you to learn. Hopefully you have taught yourself to pull 3 phrases from a book, newspaper, magazine or other source to study each week.

We will make a collection of each of the phrase we provided over the past few months with some bonus phrases for you to add to your rotation. Of course we will still provide great English learning content for you to enjoy.

If you need any help, anything at all, please contact us and we will be available to assist you with keeping your 3 phrase diet going.

Thank you,

Chromatic English


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