QUESTIONS. I. Rewrite the following sentence without using any of the Pronouns: The policeman accompanied the prisoner's sister to his house and told her that she was to let him know if she received any further annoyance from her brother or his confederates.' 2. Refer to its class each of the Pronouns in the following sentences: 'Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed.' 'Who shall be true to us, When we are so unsecret to ourselves?' 'Whatsoe'er thine ill It must be borne, and these wild starts are useless.' 'And I myself sometimes despise myself.' 'What everybody says must be true.'-'Some that speak no ill of any do no good to any.'- -"Their sound went into all the earth.'-' One may be sure of this, that one must be something to do something.''What is my life if I am no longer to be of use to others?'-'Eat such things as are set before you.'-'Whether of them twain did the will of his father?'-'Anything for a quiet life.'—"That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.'-'He is a wise man who knows what is wise.'-'That is but an empty purse that is full of another's money.' 3. How far may he, she, and it, be correctly classed as Personal Pronouns? In what respect do they differ from I and thou? [When a speaker says I or thou, the persons to whom he refers are clearly identified. The meaning of he, on the contrary, would be as indefinite as possible, unless the previous remarks enabled us to limit the application of the word.] 4. Define Pronoun and Reflexive Pronoun. Name the other classes of Pronouns and give one example of each. Place in their proper classes ours, that, which, each. noun. 5. Distinguish between the use of a Personal and a Relative ProIllustrate your explanation by reference to the two sentences: 'My brother who came is gone,' 'My brother came, but he is gone.' 6. State the rule of syntax respecting the agreement of the Relative Pronoun. Give two illustrations of the omission of the Relative, and make a sentence in which but is used with the force of a Relative. 7. Write three short sentences in which the nominative, possessive, and objective cases of who, used as a Relative Pronoun, respectively Occur. 8. 'A gate which opened to them of his own accord' (Acts xii. 10). Why is his used here? 9. Enumerate some of the principal uses of the word one. IO. Point out anything faulty in the following sentences: 'You may take either of the nine.' 'There goes John with both his dogs on either side of him.' 'Between every stitch she would look up to see what was going on in the street.' [Every is distributive and singular. It must have been at least 'every two stitches' or 'every stitch and the next' (or 'the last') that she looked between.] II. In the following sentences, to what class of Pronouns does the italicised word belong? (a) 'I believed what you told me.' (b) 'She asked who told him.' (c) 'I don't know what we have to learn by heart.' [In (a) what is Relative: 'I believed that which or the thing which you told me.' But in (b) who is Interrogative, not Relative. The sentence means, 'She asked the question, Who told him?' not, 'She asked the man who told him.' In (c) what may be either Relative or Interrogative, according to the meaning. Suppose that for his Latin lesson a boy has to write an exercise and to commit to memory Horace's Fifth Ode. If he says, 'I've done my exercise, but I don't know what we have to learn by heart,' he may mean, ‘I've done my exercise, but I don't know that (namely, the Fifth Ode) which we have to learn by heart.' In this case, what is Relative. Or he may mean, 'I've done my exercise, but I don't know the answer to the question, What have we to learn by heart?' meaning, 'I don't remember the number of the Ode which was set.' In this case, what is Interrogative.] 134 CHAPTER XV. VERBS. 136. A Verb is a word with which we can make an assertion. We make assertions about things. The word which stands for the thing about which we make the assertion is called the subject of the verb, or the subject of the sentence. As the names of things are nouns, the subject must be a noun or its equivalent, such as a pronoun, a verb in the infinitive mood, or a noun-clause. Thus we may say Error (Noun) It (Pronoun) To err (Infinitive) That one should err (Noun-clause) is human. When we make an assertion about a thing, we are said in grammatical language to predicate something about the thing. As no assertion can be made without the use of a verb, the verb is called the Predicate of the subject, or of the sentence in which it occurs. What is asserted is either action or state. Action is asserted when we say 'The prisoner stole the watch,' 'The watch was stolen by the prisoner,' 'The prisoner ran away.' State is asserted when we say "The prisoner was glad,' 'The prisoner continued unrepentant,' 'The prisoner slept soundly.' 137. The action denoted by some verbs is conceived as being directed towards, or passing over to, a certain object. When we say 'The boy kicked the dog, and the dog scratched him,' we assert actions the effects of which were not confined to the agents performing them: the boy's action passed beyond the boy, and the dog's action passed beyond the dog. But when we say 'The boy sat down and cried, and the dog barked and ran away,' we assert actions which terminated with the agents performing them. This distinction is expressed by the words Transitive and Intransitive: it is of the greatest importance. A Transitive Verb is one which indicates an action directed towards some object. An Intransitive Verb is one which indicates (1) an action not directed towards some object, or (2) a state. The student may occasionally be puzzled to determine whether a verb is used transitively or intransitively, for many verbs are used in both ways, though not of course in both ways at the same time. He must ask himself whether the action expressed by the verb produced an effect upon something outside the doer (or, in the case of a reflexive verb, upon the doer itself). He will usually find a word representing the object to which this action passed, but occasionally the object is not mentioned. The verb kicked is clearly transitive when the dog comes after it to indicate its object, and so is scratched when it is followed by him. But how are we to describe these verbs when we say 'The boy lay on the floor and kicked and scratched'? If we mean that he kicked and scratched people at large, the verbs are both transitive, though the recipients of the actions are not specified. But do we necessarily mean this? If the verbs signify that he merely threw his legs and arms about in the fruitless endeavour to reach an object, kicked and scratched are not transitive verbs here any more than walked or ran would be, though they become so, if we suppose that an object is implied. 138. As we shall have occasion to make frequent mention of the word Object in connexion with Transitive Verbs, the reader must notice that this term has unfortunately to do a double duty, standing sometimes for the thing affected by an action and sometimes for the word which represents this thing. The following definition may help the student to keep his mind clear of confusion arising from this ambiguity: The Object of a verb is the word which stands for the thing which is the object of the action denoted by the verb. It would be a concise description of a Transitive Verb to say that it is a Verb that can take an Object. 139. Intransitive Verbs are used as Transitives in these ways: 1. A verb, usually intransitive, is occasionally employed with a transitive force: Ordinarily Intransitive. The horse walks. I will run there. The ship floats. The mother rejoiced. Used Transitively. I walked my horse. I will run the boat aground. He floated the ship. The boys are flying their kites. The mother rejoiced her son's heart. 2. Prepositions following Intransitive Verbs may be regarded as forming with them compound verbs which are Transitive. Thus 'I laughed (intrans.) at him,' where the preposition at takes an objective case him, becomes 'I laughed-at (transitive) him,' where the him is the object of the verb. The passive construction can then be employed, and we can say 'He was laughed-at.' So, 'We arrived at this conclusion' becomes in the passive 'This conclusion was arrived-at': 'They came to this decision' becomes 'This decision was come-to.' 3. Prepositions prefixed to some Intransitive Verbs make them Transitive. Thus the intransitive lie becomes the transitive overlie; stand, understand; run, outrun; weep, beweep; moan, bemoan. |