Basic Terminology

Many of you have spent a great deal of time completing grammar exercises in previous courses and have become successful at correcting isolated sentences. In this book, you will be asked to analyze and edit paragraphs. Because most of the writing and editing that you will do as a university student will involve analyzing larger collections of sentences such as paragraphs, essays, and research papers, this section of Chapter 2 is the first step toward working on the skills that you will need when you begin to edit groups of sentences. First, you will analyze passages that have no errors; then, you will be asked to combine sets of short sentences and analyze your sentence combinations. Read the following paragraph, and then complete the items that follow. You are asked to identify several terms that we will be using to analyze writing in the book. This exercise will help you identify which terms you already know and which terms you need to learn.

If you need help with the basic terms, refer to the index of your textbooks, or refer to these web pages:

Parts of Speech

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1 Most languages in Europe and northern India are members of the Indo-European family of languages. 2 The parent language was probably spoken about 5,000 years ago. 3 Today, many scholars accept the steppes of southern Russia as the original home of this language family. 4 Migrations in the third millennium B.C. must have separated the people from each other and must have created today's different languages. 5 Although there are many speakers of Indo-European languages today, some Indo-European languages are now extinct. 6 Current Indo-European languages like Greek, Italian, German, Albanian, Armenian, and English are very different, but they share some common features in their sound systems, grammatical systems, and vocabulary. 7 If language scholars today can reconstruct the parent language, language learning may become easier.

After reading this page, resize your browser window so that it takes up only half of your screen. When you click on the Exercise link, another browser window will open. Adjust the two windows on your screen so that they are side by side. Scroll up on this page so that the paragraph shows. You will need to copy words and phrases from this page and paste them into the Quiz page.

I am ready to do the Basic Terminology Exercise. (Remember to use the Online Quiz ID that the professor gave you.)

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