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English grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how English encodes each shift.
Common questions about English
What can I toggle on the English wheel?
Subject (person, number), tense (past, present, future), aspect (simple, progressive, perfect, perfect progressive), mood (declarative, question, command), polarity, voice (active, passive), and register. Each spin rebuilds the verb sequence and the surrounding word order.
How does aspect stack on top of tense?
Toggling progressive turns 'I work' into 'I am working'; perfect adds 'have / has / had'; both at once gives 'I have been working'. Each combination swaps the auxiliary and the form of the main verb.
What does the voice toggle do?
Switching from active to passive promotes the object to subject position and inserts a form of 'be' plus the past participle. The original subject either drops or moves into a 'by ...' phrase, and the wheel rebuilds the rest of the sentence around it.
Does English really have register on the wheel?
Yes. Toggling register flips contractions on or off ('I am' vs 'I'm'), and on commands and questions the wheel surfaces the polite alternatives — 'Could you pass the salt?' versus 'Pass the salt'.
Why is the English wheel useful if I already speak English?
Putting the English wheel side-by-side with another language's wheel makes it easy to see what each one chooses to mark on the verb. Categories you take for granted in English become visible as something the wheel has to decide.
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.