The written material below accompanies the speech. It preserves notation and source detail that would be awkward to read aloud. The full exercise passages and questions are in the audio transcript.
The six everyday expressions from Incomplete expressions and coordination are:
The brackets are structural markers, not part of the spoken example. For the two one-word phrases in Technical meanings and one-word phrases, the relevant words are Stop! and Would you like pepper with that?
| Noun phrase | Adjective phrase functioning as modifier | Head noun |
|---|---|---|
| a long time | long | time |
| a little bit | little | bit |
| other people | other | people |
| the twelfth one | twelfth | one |
| the supreme court | supreme | court |
| a very good morning | very good | morning |
| the only way I know | only | way |
| an old man | old | man |
| social media | social | media |
In Subjects and possessive noun phrases, the subjects are you win; time is on my side; a little bit goes a long way; other people can help; the supreme court released its decision; often, the twelfth one is perfect; a very good morning is a rare pleasure; on Monday, the shop will be closed; and what do human rights mean?
Possessive spellings: my, mine, its, whose, Brett’s, time’s, other people’s, the supreme court’s, and the lady who lives here’s. The first-person reference to “my brothers” in Missing past-tense forms and word families is retained from Brett’s prose.
An asterisk marks a form that the book judges ungrammatical. These judgments are announced in the spoken text:
The parenthesized choice I had (a) tea becomes both I had tea and I had a tea in Why does this matter?. The acceptable comparison is I had a cookie. The transcript retains these spellings; pronunciation instructions never replace them.
The French example, from Countability across languages:
| French | J’ | ai | coupé | mes | cheveux. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gloss | I | have | cut | my.PL | hair.PL |
Translation: “I cut my hair.” PL marks plural. The running French sentence is J’ai coupé mes cheveux. The line breaks and word alignment come from the source example labelled ex:cheveaux; the label’s spelling is retained as an identifier.
| Present form in the source | Past-tense form |
|---|---|
| want | wanted |
| play | played |
| go | went |
| come | came |
| run | ran |
| make | made |
| is | was |
| are | were |
The noun rows list magazine, jeans, idea, and government, with “not applicable” in place of a past-tense form.
| Plain form | -s form | -ing form |
|---|---|---|
| run | runs | running |
| go | goes | going |
| try | tries | trying |
| make | makes | making |
| do | does | doing |
| have | has | having |
| contemplate | contemplates | contemplating |
| recondition | reconditions | reconditioning |
The source’s nested verb phrases are have (finished dinner) and may (be (leaving soon)). Parentheses mark the smaller VPs; underlining identifies each head. The currency example is He’s asking for a $10,000 raise. Its amount is spelled out in the speech input.
The VP identification is She is usually playing tennis with a friend. The smaller VP usually playing tennis with a friend remains a separate example.
The corpus figures in The direction of a claim are Brett’s existing calculations, reproduced from Chapter 1: about 34,500 noun successors and 48,400 non-noun successors per million words. They have not been rerun. The statement about division is spoken as “reversing the order can change the answer,” which expresses non-commutativity without treating the printed inequality as true for every pair of values.
The countability labels and Longman quotation are attributed to the entries cited by the book. This adaptation does not claim that those web entries have been checked for subsequent changes. In Agreement with the subject, “they” is described as plural in that example, preserving its role in the printed agreement contrast without making a general claim about every use of they.
Bibliographic information comes from the project’s bibliography. The underlying publications have not been freshly audited for this narration adaptation.
The accepted Reading A and B transcripts retain their existing source notes and approved adaptations. Index entries, layout instructions, rotated answer-key typography, bibliographic keys, and URLs are not narration.
The opening epigraph and Allen quotation follow exactly as supplied in the chapter, with TeX formatting converted to Markdown.
Listen:
I have no answer to your question
I am not kidding when I tell you:
I earned my own voice
The shape it makes in the world holds me
— Kazim Ali, “Origin Story”
You can see from the list that some nouns can be counted and others can not. For example, if you want to tell your friend about the fruit on the tree, you could tell them your tree has plenty of plums on it. The noun ‘plum’ is countable so you have to make it plural by adding an ‘-s-’ (sic). Or you could tell them your tree has plenty of fruit on it. In this case, the noun ‘fruit’ is uncountable, so you can not count an ‘-s’.
— Rosemary Allen (2008: 1), as quoted in the chapter