Perhaps it was from her father that she got her restlessness. Accidentally she put her finger on the label of what looked to be the top of an ordinary hat, and the flat shape she held immediately took the form of a hat. Her only ideas regarding him came through an incident that happened when she was about fourteen.
She had never seen him, and her mother never mentioned his name. Her father lived in her mind as an ideal. She rushed, filled with questions, to her mother, for as long as she could remember there had never been a man in the house, and she had never seen such a hat except in pictures. Her mother was anything but romantic. She and her mother had been giving their house its fall cleaning, and she had found, wrapped up in an old silk comforter, what she took to be a hat—it was shaped like one except that it had no crown. “Your father’s,” had been the mother’s laconic answer, her lips drawing into a hard, straight line that forbade further questioning.
Chapter VI
GRAMMAR
In this short discussion of grammar the attempt is not made to discuss exhaustively all the features of English grammar. The purpose is only to survey and to identify all the elements of an ordinary sentence. The definitions are few, and are descriptions rather than formal definitions. The parts of speech are treated as they become important in the structure of the sentence. Such a treatment of essentials as this is necessary partly as a review, but especially because a teacher and a student cannot discuss many of the commonest sentence faults unless they have a mutually intelligible terminology. A student must be able to recognize such grammatical elements as a subject or an object, a participle or an infinitive, a phrase or a clause, in order to produce correct and effective sentences. There is a minimum amount of grammatical knowledge without which a writer cannot rewrite his compositions so as to avoid the commonest errors and imperfections.
What Grammar Is
Grammar is the study of the structure of sentences, and of the forms and functions of words and word-groups within sentences. In simple terms, grammar is the examination of the machinery of language.
Sentences
Sentences make assertions (declarative sentences), or ask questions (interrogative sentences), or give commands (imperative sentences), or express emotion (exclamatory sentences). Written sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point.
The most common kind of written sentence is that which makes an assertion. This kind, called declarative, may well be taken, therefore, as the most available basis for the discussion of the machinery of the sentence. The word sentence in this chapter will accordingly mean a declarative sentence.