PELIC 9 – English Grammar Profiler
Point 97 in PRONOUNS is defined as: possessive ‘THEIRS’ with singular and plural reference, in object positions, and complement positions after ‘be’ and after prepositions. An iWeb search for * * * * theirs . : 1 YOUR PROBLEM , NOT THEIRS . 31 2 . THE CHOICE IS THEIRS . 27 3 BE THE …
THEIRS (object) Read More »
Point 96 in PRONOUNS is defined as: possessive pronoun ‘hers’, with singular reference, in object positions, and complement positions after ‘be’ and after prepositions. In iWeb: * * _vb hers 1 THE CHOICE IS HERS 28 BabyGaga What To Do If Someone Announced Your Pregnancy Before You Were Ready The choice is hers to …
HERS (object) Read More »
Point 95 in the category of PRONOUNS is defined as: ‘ ‘it’ as an object with ‘make’ to introduce something the speaker or writer is going to refer to. The 2 examples in the EGP follow the structure make|makes it _jj for *although the following adjective might get incorrectly tagged as an adverb. 1 …
make it (introduce reference) Read More »
Point 94 in the category of PRONOUNS is defined as: plural reflexive pronouns after prepositions where the object of the preposition is the same as the subject of the verb. Point 88 in the same category is: plural reflexive pronouns with ‘by’ to mean alone, without any help. *Note this point is practically already covered …
preposition + plural reflexive Read More »
Point 93 in the category of PRONOUNS / reflexive is defined as singular pronoun ‘itself’ for emphasis. An iWeb search for _nn1 itself: 1 GAME ITSELF 15067 2 LIFE ITSELF 10893 3 CITY ITSELF 7443 4 SYSTEM ITSELF 7390 5 PROCESS ITSELF 7192 6 PRODUCT ITSELF 6909 7 BUILDING ITSELF 5512 8 DEVICE ITSELF 4694 …
noun + ITSELF (emphasis) Read More »
Point 92 in PRONOUNS is defined as: full range of indefinite pronouns as subjects, with a singular verb. A search inWeb for: . nothing|everybody|everywhere|anything _v And PELIC B2 student examples: 1 . NOTHING IS 18676 25027,ar9,Chinese,Male,529,4,w,3285,1,566 We can lie on the meadow and breathed fresh air. Nothing is better than this. 2 . NOTHING WAS …
nothing | everybody | everywhere | anything (subject) Read More »
This post lists two clashing points in the English Grammar Profile. The only difference that we can guess from the definition is that the B1 point does not require the subject position. B2 point 91 in PRONOUNS is defined as: ‘ONE’ as a generic personal pronoun in the subject position to mean people in general. …
one (pronoun) Read More »
Point 90 in the category of PRONOUNS / generic is defined as: ‘we’ and ‘us’ to refer to people in general. This is a point that requires manual searching in the corpora for the ‘usage’ definition to be met. A search for we|us in iWeb is not possible because they are such common words. The complexity …
WE | US (people in general) Read More »
Point 89 in the category of PRONOUNS/ quantity is defined as: ‘each’, ‘either’, ‘enough’, ‘neither’, ‘several’ as subject and object pronouns. Two examples from PELIC B2/C1 students: subject pronoun object pronoun Although these vocabulary items are easy to find, they usually are not acting as subjects or objects. This makes finding more information about the …
each | either | enough | neither | several Read More »
Point 84 in the category of PRONOUNS / reciprocal is defined as: ‘ONE ANOTHER’ as the object of a verb or complement of a preposition to talk about the mutual behaviour of two or more people, often in formal contexts. A search for * * * * one another in iWeb: 1 TO GET TO …
one another Read More »
Point 82 in the category of PRONOUNS quantity is defined as: a wide range of pronouns (‘neither’, ‘either’, ‘none’) with ‘of’ followed by an object pronoun. For example: So in a yin-yang way, silence needs loudness and loudness needs silence for either of them to have any effect. However most of this structure overlaps with Negation point 19, so we will only investigate ‘either of them|us’ in this post. Collocates …
either of them | us Read More »
Point 80 in the category of PRONOUNS is defined as: plural reflexive pronouns for emphasis. Point 83: plural reflexive pronouns to refer to actions where the subject and object of the verb are the same. This overlaps many other reflexive pronoun points and ’emphasis’ is not something corpus searches will do automatically. We can quite …
plural reflexive pronouns Read More »
I am always looking for true learner texts to see how the complexity checker will perform. EnglishGrammar.Pro is very lucky to have access to a very large and clearly documented learner corpus. PELIC is based on data collected from students at the English Language Institute (ELI) at the University of Pittsburgh from 2005-2012…. The IEP data include …
Pittsburgh learner corpus & complexity checker Read More »
In the EGP, there are several points in the category of PRONOUNS with the possessive pronoun ‘ours’: C1 Point 101: … in subject position B2 Point 72: … with singular and plural reference, in subject position. B2 Point 86 is the same except: … in object positions, and complement positions after ‘be’ and after prepositions. …
OURS Read More »
B2 point 54 in the category of PAST is defined as: past perfect simple with a wide range of adverbs (including ‘finally’, ‘recently’, ‘simply’) in the normal mid-position. B1 point 46 in the category of PAST is defined as: past perfect simple with a limited range of adverbs (including ‘never’, ‘ever’, ‘just’, ‘always’, ‘already’) in …
past perfect simple + adverb Read More »
There are many points at A2 that are related to adverbs and overlap. Sadly there is some clash of information between the levels of A1 and A2 though. Point 7 in the category of PRESENT is defined as: present simple WITH ADVERBS OF INDEFINITE FREQUENCY In the example sentences, we find ‘usually’ and ‘always’ used. …
usually | often | never | weekly + (present simple) Read More »
When we look at the most common examples with the grammar pattern: ‘it is adjective that clause’ It is clear that he stole it. It is possible that the police won’t find him. It is likely that the man will get away. We see they all appear to have modal adjectives (clear, possible, likely) that show how sure we are about the following clause using ‘FOCUS’. Two of …
It’s + adjective + ‘that’ clause (focus) Read More »
There are many points that relate to ‘NO ARTICLE’ in the English Grammar Profile. Although there are overlapping examples across some of the levels, the main difference in regards to marking complexity relies on the level of the vocabulary used. For this reason, it is probably better to rely more on the English Vocabulary Profile …
NO ARTICLE Read More »
Let’s look at an example in student writing: In Korea, it is so common that women should be looking for a job after divorce. PELIC Korean female level 4 writing. ‘Should’ can express obligation or expectation. ‘Should’ can be used with a continuous form: Should be + lookING In the English Grammar Profile at B2, there are 3 points covering ‘should + continuous form’. Points 141 (general), 164 and …
‘She should be looking for a job’ (SHOULD BE + verb ING) Read More »
Let’s look at two examples to explain this grammar. The first is from a student writing example using past continuous with an adverb that shows he didn’t control the situation with his friend and the second one is from an expert speaker using passives: For example, he was always playing soccer when I played baseball. PELIC Korean male level 4 grammar class. They were …
(always | constantly) + past continuous Read More »