Devika Panikar
δάσκαλος (dáskalos) means the teacher in Greek. Devika Panikar has been teaching English Language and Literature since 2006. She is an Assistant Professor with the Directorate of Collegiate Education under the Government of Kerala and now works at the Government College Kasaragod. This website is a collection of lecture notes she prepared by referring to various sources for her students’ perusal.
Types of Nouns
Recognising the different types of nouns in English grammar will help to develop one's ability to write and speak with precision.Compound NounsCompound nouns are formed from two or more words. Mos...
Tag Question Transformation
The standard or classical, model of transformational generative grammar posits two levels of representation for sentences, an abstract deep structure of meaning relationships and a concrete surface st...
Writing an Effective Email
While most of us are happy to write informal emails to friends, we get jittery when asked to write to people whom we are supposed to make a good impression on, or where we need to be careful or diplom...
Noun Classes
Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. The grammatical categories associated with nouns are number, gender and case. There are dif...
Disambiguation Using TG Grammar
TG grammar attempts to describe actual and potential sentences. It aims at generating all and only sentences of a language. It is able to detect ambiguity. If a structure is understood in two ways by ...
Email Writing
Email stands for electronic mail. It is the easiest and the cheapest way of communication. It is used in formal, semi-formal as well as an informal way of expression or writing.Every email you wri...
Analysis Using TG Grammar
In English, sentences are always made up of noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP).A noun phrase should always contain at least a noun. It can also contain a determiner (Det), an adjective, and a p...
The Transformational Framework
TG grammar makes use of transformations. The transformational component helps to convert structures from one level to another. In TG analysis we start with the kernel sentence to which PS rules are ap...
Transformational Rules
Transformational Generative grammar is based on the assumption that sentences are of two types- those with the simplest structures are called the basic or kernel sentences. Several sentences with more...
Question Tags
A tag question is a special construction in English. It is a statement followed by a mini-question. We use tag questions to ask for confirmation. They mean something like: "Is that right?" or "Do you ...