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English phrases, by meaning
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Common questions about English
What's covered on this English page?
Twenty-two functional categories of meaning, with English examples in each: tense and aspect (simple, progressive, perfect, perfect-progressive), modality (can/could/may/might/must/should/would), do-support for questions and negation, voice (active, passive, get-passive), comparison with -er/more, the cleft and pseudo-cleft (it was X that..., what I want is...), and 16 others. Each example carries a word-by-word gloss with grammatical labels.
Why does English need an auxiliary for questions and negation?
Because lexical verbs in English don't invert with the subject the way they used to. 'You like coffee' becomes 'Do you like coffee?' rather than 'Like you coffee?' — the dummy auxiliary do appears precisely so something can move to the front. The same machinery handles negation: 'I don't like coffee'. Modal and auxiliary verbs (be, have, can, must, etc.) skip do because they invert directly.
How does English mark aspect without dedicated tense morphology?
By layering auxiliaries. Be + -ing handles ongoing action (is running), have + -ed handles completed-with-current-relevance (has eaten), and they stack (has been running) for both at once. Compared with languages that mark aspect with a single particle, English builds aspectual meaning compositionally — every layer adds one piece.
What variety of English is this — American, British, something else?
International standard English, leaning slightly American in spelling and lexicon (color, elevator) but neutral in syntax. The phrases here work in both major standards; where the two diverge meaningfully (have got vs. have, the past participle of 'get'), examples favor forms that read naturally on either side of the Atlantic.
What does the 'gloss' under each phrase actually show?
The gloss aligns one English word at a time with its functional role and meaning: SUBJECT, OBJECT, AUX, V.PRES, V.PAST, DET, etc. For language learners coming into English from another L1, the gloss makes English's grammatical machinery visible: which word is doing the questioning, which carries the tense, which signals possession.
Sources for English
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43146-0.
- Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. ISBN 0-582-51734-6.
- Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman. ISBN 0-582-23725-4.
- Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58846-1.
- Swan, M. (2016). Practical English Usage. 4th ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-420243-5.