Practice & Reference

Glossary

This page lists all 173 key terms of the Learn section in alphabetical order. Each entry has a definition, examples and a link to each page that teaches the term. To find a term quickly, type it in the Search box under Topics.

A

Absolute phrase: A noun and a participle forming a small unit of their own, attached to nothing in the main sentence; also called a nominative absolute. Drawn floating above the clause. “The rain having stopped, we walked home.” “Her voice trembling, Nora read the letter.”
Taught on Participles
Adjectival infinitive phrase: An adjectival infinitive phrase modifies a noun or pronoun. In the diagram, it hangs beneath that word, the way a prepositional phrase would. “Mia found a place to sleep.” “We have nothing to do.”
Taught on Infinitives
Adjectival prepositional phrase: A prepositional phrase modifying a noun. Hangs from that noun; the Roles exercise calls it an Adjectival prep. phrase. “The letter from Melvin arrived.” “The girl with the green umbrella waited outside.”
Taught on Prepositional Phrases
Adjective: A word describing a noun. An attributive adjective stands next to its noun and hangs on a slant. A predicate adjective comes after a linking verb and sits on the base line, after a backslash. “The tired hikers rested.” — attributive. “The hikers were tired.” — predicate.
Taught on Articles, Adjectives & Objects
Adjective clause: A dependent clause modifying a noun. Most are relative clauses; one introduced by “where”, “when” or “why” is an adjective clause too. Relation relcl for both. “The violin that she inherited needs strings.” “That is the year when the bridge closed.”
Taught on Adjective Clauses
Adjective phrase: An adjective together with what it carries — a prepositional phrase, an infinitive — set off from the noun it describes. Drawn on a slant beneath that noun, like any adjective. Relation advcl when it comes first in the sentence. Other books use the name for a prepositional or participial phrase doing an adjective’s work; this app does not. “Weary from the hike, Mia slept.” “Eager to help, the boys carried the bags.”
Taught on Articles, Adjectives & Objects
Adjunct: An optional element you can delete without breaking the sentence. Adjuncts hang below the base line. “Birds sing at dawn.” — remove “at dawn” and the sentence still stands. “Yesterday the kettle broke.” — “yesterday” is an adjunct too.
Taught on Grammar Basics
Adverb: A word modifying a verb, adjective or adverb. Tagged RB (or RBR/RBS for comparative and superlative), relation advmod. “She spoke softly.” — on a verb. “She spoke too softly.” — on another adverb. “a very old map” — on an adjective.
Taught on Adverbs
Adverb clause: A dependent clause doing an adverb’s job; also called an “adverbial clause”. Relation advcl. “We left because it rained.” “When the bell rang, everyone stood.”
Taught on Adverb Clauses
Adverbial: Anything doing an adverb’s job — a single word, a prepositional phrase, or a whole clause. All three hang below the word they modify. “She left early.” “She left at dawn.” “She left when the bell rang.” — a word, a phrase and a clause.
Taught on Adverbs
Adverbial clause: Another name for an adverb clause: a clause that does an adverb’s job. Its verb is labelled advcl, and it normally starts with a subordinating conjunction labelled mark. The diagrams and exercises say “adverb clause”. “We left because it rained.” “When the bell rang, everyone stood.”
Taught on Modifier Relations
Adverbial infinitive phrase: An adverbial infinitive phrase modifies a verb, an adjective or an adverb. Most often it says why. In the diagram, it hangs beneath the word it modifies. “Leo ran to catch the bus.” “I am happy to help.”
Taught on Infinitives
Adverbial objective: A noun phrase answering an adverb’s question — how long, how far, how much, when — drawn below the word it modifies like an indirect object. Relation npadvmod when the parser recognises it. The diagram draws a bare “today” or “home” as an adverb instead. “We waited an hour.” “It has rained every day this week.”
Taught on Adverbial Objectives & Retained Objects · Modifier Relations
Adverbial prepositional phrase: A prepositional phrase modifying a verb, adjective or adverb. Hangs from that word; the Roles exercise calls it an Adverbial prep. phrase. “He runs before breakfast.” “My brother is afraid of storms.”
Taught on Prepositional Phrases
Affix: A prefix or suffix split from its stem — the “co” of “co-captains”. It is AFX only when a person corrects the tag. “Two students were made co-captains.” “The pre-war house survived.”
Taught on Numbers, Symbols & the Rest
Agent: The doer in a passive sentence, named in a “by” phrase. In the tree, “by” has the relation agent. “The road was flooded by the storm.” “The letter was signed by the mayor.”
Taught on Miscellaneous
Antecedent: The noun the relative pronoun refers back to — the one the clause modifies. “The violin that she inherited” — “violin” is the antecedent of “that”. “The guide who found the trail” — “guide” is the antecedent of “who”.
Taught on Adjective Clauses
Appositive: A second name for the noun next to it: a noun, or a whole phrase or clause. Reed-Kellogg writes it in parentheses after that noun; a phrase or clause stands on a pedestal inside them. In the tree, a noun appositive has the relation appos. “My friend Jacob called.” “The capital, Lima, is on the coast.”
Taught on Possessives & Appositives · Nominal Dependents
Arc: One head-to-dependent link, carrying a relation label. The Dependencies exercise calls arcs “Edges” (its count includes the ROOT arrow) and asks for each one’s relation, head and dependent. “Birds sing.” has one arc, nsubj, from “sing” to “birds”. “Birds sing loudly.” has two; the second is labelled advmod.
Taught on Dependency Parsing
Argument: An element the verb requires: a subject, a direct object, an indirect object or a complement. Most arguments sit on the base line; the indirect object hangs below the verb. “Omar needs a ladder.” — drop either one and the sentence breaks. “She gave him a map.” — “a map” sits on the base line, and “him”, the indirect object, hangs below “gave”.
Taught on Grammar Basics
Article: “a”, “an”, “the”. A kind of determiner, drawn on a slant like any other modifier. Tagged DT. “A kestrel caught the vole.” “An owl hooted.”
Taught on Articles, Adjectives & Objects
Aspect: How a verb phrase presents an action: as a whole, completed before a reference point, in progress, or in progress up to a reference point. Helping verbs build it. “Marta painted the kitchen.” “Marta was painting the kitchen.”
Taught on Aspect
Attributive adjective: An adjective before its noun — “a tiny weed”. Drawn on a slant under the noun. “A tiny weed grew.” “The old map tore.”
Taught on Adjectives & Adverbs
Auxiliary: Any helping verb: the modals, plus “be”, “have” and “do” when they support a main verb rather than being one. “She has finished.” — “has” helps “finished”. “She has a car.” — here “has” is the main verb, not an auxiliary. One exception in the exercises: the POS exercise wants AUX for a linking “be” even when it is the only verb, because the parser labels it that way.
Taught on Modal Auxiliaries · Verbs & Auxiliaries · Function Word Relations

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B

Bare infinitive: An infinitive without “to”, after the object of “make”, “let”, “see”, “hear” or “help”. It is still an infinitive phrase, not a verb phrase. “Our guide let us touch the statue.” “We heard the baby cry.”
Taught on Infinitives
Base line: The long horizontal line of a Reed-Kellogg diagram. It holds the core of the clause: the subject, the verb phrase, and any direct object or complement. “Rain falls.” — both words stand on it. “The kettle was whistling.” — “kettle” and “was whistling” stand on it; “The” hangs below.
Taught on Subjects & Verbs

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C

Cardinal number: A counting number — “three”, “42”. NUM/CD. Ordinals (“third”) are adjectives. “Three boats sank.” “Tickets cost 42 dollars.”
Taught on Numbers, Symbols & the Rest
ccomp: “Clausal complement” — a clause completing a verb, with its own subject. Contrast xcomp, whose subject comes from the main clause. “Everyone knows that the ferry left.” — “left” is the ccomp of “knows”. “She said that the bridge closed.”
Taught on Noun Clauses
Chevron (a fork): A line splits into two or more parallel branches, one for each joined word. It means coordination: two subjects, two verbs or two objects sharing the rest of the clause. The conjunction sits on a dashed line between the branches. “Santiago and his sister laughed.” — two subjects, joined again before one verb. “She washed and dried the plates.” — one subject, two verbs.
Taught on Reed-Kellogg Diagrams
Clause: A group of words containing a subject and a verb. An “independent” (main) clause can stand alone as a sentence; a “dependent” (subordinate) clause cannot. “The sun rises.” is an independent clause. “when the sun rises” has a subject and a verb too, but it cannot stand alone: it is a dependent clause. The Roles exercise boxes each sentence's Main clause: the whole independent clause, with any clause that depends on it inside. It names the dependent clause by its kind: noun, adjective or adverb clause.
Taught on Grammar Basics
Closed class: A word class with a fixed membership — determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, particles. The parser looks the word up and then decides which of its jobs it is doing. “The keys were in the drawer.” — “the” and “in” belong to closed classes. “She left because it rained.” — so does “because”.
Taught on Determiners & Function Words
Common noun: A noun that names a kind of thing rather than one particular thing — “river”, “courage”. NN when singular or mass, NNS when plural. “The river flooded.” “Courage matters.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns
Complement: A word, phrase or clause that completes the verb. Reed-Kellogg draws two kinds behind a backslash on the base line: a subjective complement renames or describes the subject, an objective complement the direct object. “She became a pilot.” “The neighbours call him Beto.”
Taught on Indirect Objects & Complements · Core Arguments
Complementary infinitive phrase: The infinitive phrase that completes “have to, have got to, ought to, used to, be going to, be supposed to” or “be to”, the pairs EFL books call phrasal modals. It is drawn on a pedestal straight after the verb, with no divider. “Sam has to feed the cat.” “You ought to rest.”
Taught on Infinitives
Complex sentence: A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. “We left because it rained.” “The violin that she inherited needs new strings.”
Taught on Adverb Clauses · Compound-Complex Sentences
Compound: A noun used to modify another noun. Distinguished from amod purely by the modifier’s part of speech — see Parts of Speech. “The kitchen door stuck.” “A philosophy professor spoke.”
Taught on Nominal Dependents
Compound element: Two or more subjects, verbs or objects sharing the rest of the clause. Drawn as a fork on one base line; two verbs make a compound predicate. “Ana and Luis arrived early.” — two subjects. “Nina knocked and waited.” — two verbs. “We need eggs and rice.” — two objects.
Taught on Imperatives & Conjunctions
Compound predicate: Two verbs sharing one subject. Labelled with conj exactly like a compound sentence — the difference is whether the second verb has its own nsubj. “She washed and dried the plates.” “The dog barked and ran.”
Taught on Coordination
Compound sentence: Two independent clauses joined by a conjunction. Drawn as two base lines with a dashed step-down between them. “She knocked, and the door opened.” “The bell rang, but nobody moved.”
Taught on Imperatives & Conjunctions · Compound-Complex Sentences
Compound-complex sentence: Two or more independent clauses plus at least one dependent clause. Its diagram has a step-down between the equal clauses and a dashed line or a pedestal for each dependent clause. “We left because it rained, and the dog followed us.” “She kept the letter that he sent, but she never replied.”
Taught on Compound-Complex Sentences
Conjunct: One of the things being joined. The first conjunct is the head of the whole coordination; each later one is labelled conj. “Carlos and Rosa danced.” — “Rosa” is the conj of “Carlos”. “She washed and dried the plates.”
Taught on Coordination
Constituency: The view of a sentence as nested groups of words, each group doing one job. This is what a Reed-Kellogg diagram draws. “The tired birds slept.” is [the tired birds] + [slept], with [tired] nested inside the first group. “Birds sing at dawn.” is [birds] + [sing at dawn].
Taught on Grammar Basics
Continuous: The British name for “progressive”. Course books say “past continuous” for the past progressive. “The kids were singing.” — past continuous. “He has been sleeping all day.” — present perfect continuous.
Taught on Tense & Aspect Chart
Coordinating conjunction: “and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet” — the seven words that join equals. Most are tagged CC and labelled cc in the tree, but the parser reads “for” between two clauses as a mark and “so” as an advmod. “Tea or coffee?” “She tried, but the door stuck.”
Taught on Imperatives & Conjunctions · Coordination
Copula (linking verb): “be” joining a subject to a description — “Marta is a pilot”. Tagged AUX by this model even though it is the only verb present. “The soup is cold.” “Marta is a pilot.”
Taught on Verbs & Auxiliaries
Core argument: Something a verb or preposition needs, not just allows. Deleting it usually breaks the sentence instead of shortening it. “Diego owns a bicycle.” — drop “a bicycle” and the sentence breaks. “She became a pilot.”
Taught on Core Arguments
Correlative pair: A two-part conjunction: “either…or”, “neither…nor” or “both…and”. The leading half is preconj; the middle half stays cc. “Either Diego or Marta will cook.” “Both my aunt and my uncle called.”
Taught on Coordination
Crossing arcs: Two arcs that cross in the tree. The words keep their sentence order, so an arc can cross another when a phrase is separated from its head by words that belong somewhere else. It is rare, and it is not an error. “A man came from Cali who knew my dad.” — the arc from “man” to “knew” crosses the arc between “from” and “Cali”. “A text came from Diego that said sorry.” — the arc from “text” to “said” crosses the arc between “from” and “Diego”.
Taught on Dependency Parsing
csubj: “Clausal subject” — the relation when a whole construction, rather than a single noun, is the subject. “Rescuing the kitten took an hour.” — “Rescuing” is the csubj of “took”. “Whoever arrives first will unlock the door.”
Taught on Gerunds

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D

Dangling participle: A participial phrase with no noun in the sentence for it to modify. A writing error, not a diagramming one. “Walking home, the rain started.” — the rain was not walking. “Having finished the exam, the pencils were collected.”
Taught on Participles
Dashed line: A line that connects two words on different lines. Often a conjunction sits on it, as in the chevron above. “We left because it rained.” — “because” sits on a dashed line from “left” down to “rained”. A relative pronoun is not on the line: it fills a slot in its own clause, and the dashed line joins it to the noun it refers to. “The scarf that Marta knitted is blue.” — “that” is the direct object of “knitted”, and a dashed line joins it to “scarf”.
Taught on Reed-Kellogg Diagrams
Declarative sentence: A sentence that states something, with the subject before the verb and a full stop at the end. “The ferry leaves at noon.” “Our neighbours keep bees.”
Taught on Sentence Types & Voice
Degree: Positive, comparative or superlative — “long, longer, longest”. The fine tag records it: JJ, JJR, JJS for adjectives and RB, RBR, RBS for adverbs. “This road is longer.” “That road is the longest.”
Taught on Adjectives & Adverbs
Deletion test: Delete a word or phrase and check whether the rest is still a complete sentence. If it is, the part you deleted was usually a modifier. If it is not, the part was required, usually a core argument. “The engine started reluctantly.” — delete “reluctantly” and the sentence is still complete. “Marta repaired the radio.” — delete “the radio” and it is not.
Taught on Modifier Relations
Dependency: The view of a sentence as a set of labelled word-to-word links. This is what the dependency tree draws, and what the parser actually computes. In “Birds sing.” the one link runs from “sing” to “birds” (nsubj). In “The tired birds slept.” every word links to exactly one other.
Taught on Grammar Basics
Dependent: The word doing the depending — the arrow points at it. “Birds sing.” — “birds” is the dependent of “sing”. “Birds sing loudly.” — “loudly” is a second dependent of the same verb.
Taught on Dependency Parsing
Dependent clause: A clause that has a subject and a verb but cannot stand alone as a sentence. The three kinds are adverb, adjective and noun clauses, named for the job they do. The Roles exercise asks for the kind, not for the general name. “We left because it rained.” “The violin that she inherited needs strings.”
Taught on Adverb Clauses
Determiner: A word that comes before a noun and tells you which one, how many or whose. DT, WDT or PDT. “The printer jammed.” “Which jacket fits you?” “Half the shops were closed.”
Taught on Determiners & Function Words
Direct address: Naming the person spoken to. Grammatically outside the clause — which is why a Reed-Kellogg diagram floats it on its own line above the base line. “Children, we must hurry.” “Pass the salt, Maria.”
Taught on Root & Other Relations
Direct object: A noun, pronoun or equivalent expression receiving the action — ask “whom?” or “what?” after a verb that is not linking. On the base line, after a half vertical; an infinitive phrase, gerund phrase or noun clause stands there on a pedestal. Relation dobj for a noun. “A kestrel caught a vole.” “She hopes to visit Lisbon.” — ask “caught what? hopes what?”.
Taught on Articles, Adjectives & Objects
Disjunct: An adverb commenting on the whole sentence rather than modifying anything in it. It is drawn floating above the clause, unconnected. “Clearly, the guests enjoyed the meal.” “Luckily, nobody was hurt.”
Taught on Adverbs
Ditransitive verb: A verb taking both a direct and an indirect object — “give, send, tell, show, offer”. “She sent him a letter.” “They offered us seats.”
Taught on Indirect Objects & Complements

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E

Ellipsis: Leaving out words that the reader can understand from the words around them. The tree never adds them. Reed-Kellogg marks some with an “x” (the understood “you”, a left-out “that”), but Grammify does not yet fill in a missing verb. “She can sing, and he can too.” — “sing” is missing after the second “can”. “Some left early, others late.” — the verb “left” is missing before “late”.
Taught on Miscellaneous
Emphatic form: “do”, “does” or “did” + the base form, used to stress that something is true. Traditional grammar counts it as a form of its own; the chart and the filters count it as simple. “She does like the new teacher.” “We did call you twice!”
Taught on Tense & Aspect Chart
Exclamatory sentence: A sentence that expresses strong feeling and ends in an exclamation mark, often starting with “what” or “how”. “What a long day this was!” “How quickly the summer passed!”
Taught on Sentence Types & Voice
Existential there: The “there” of “there is”. A placeholder subject, tagged EX, with PRON as its coarse category. “There is a map on the wall.” “There were four questions on the test.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns
Expletive: A word that fills a grammatical slot but adds no meaning. The common case is “there” in the subject position: the real subject comes after the verb, and the verb agrees with it. Relation expl. “There is a pharmacy nearby.” “There are two buses every hour.”
Taught on Adverbial Objectives & Retained Objects · Function Word Relations

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F

Fallback label: dep, the label the parser uses when no other relation fits. On correct English it means the parse went wrong. “The what the how.” — broken input, so “what” gets dep. “Diego, the taxi is here.” — correct English, but the parser labels the name “Diego” dep; it is really direct address.
Taught on Root & Other Relations
Finite form: A form that can head a clause on its own: VBD, VBP and VBZ, which carry tense and agree with a subject, and MD, the modals. The participles are non-finite, and so is the base form, except in a command or a base-form subjunctive. “She sings.” — VBZ. “They sang.” — VBD. “They want to sing.” — VB, non-finite.
Taught on Verbs & Auxiliaries
Finite verb: A verb that can head a clause by itself. Most finite verbs are inflected for tense, but some have no tense in this app: commands, base-form subjunctives and modals other than “will” and “shall”. Contrast the non-finite forms, which cannot head a clause. “The kettle whistles.” — present tense. “The kettle whistled.” — past tense; either one heads the clause alone.
Taught on Grammar Basics · Subjects & Verbs
Floating line (no connection): A short horizontal line above the diagram, attached to nothing. It holds a word that stands outside the clause’s grammar: a person being addressed (a vocative), or an adverb commenting on the whole sentence (a disjunct). “Elena, we need your help.” — “Elena” floats above the clause. “Frankly, the plan failed.” — so does “Frankly”.
Taught on Reed-Kellogg Diagrams
Full vertical: The divider that crosses the base line, above and below it. It separates the subject from the predicate, and each clause has exactly one. “Rain falls.” — it stands between “Rain” and “falls”. “Windows had been cleaned.” — it stands between “Windows” and “had been cleaned”.
Taught on Subjects & Verbs
Function word: A word that carries grammatical meaning rather than dictionary meaning: determiners, auxiliaries, markers and particles. “The kettle had whistled.” — a determiner and an auxiliary. “We left because it rained.” — a marker.
Taught on Function Word Relations
Future in the past: “would” + a base form, or “was going to” or “were going to” + a base form: a later event seen from a past moment. It has no tense in this app. “The forecast said it would rain.” “Ana was going to join us.”
Taught on Tense
Future tense: “will” or “shall” + a base form, and in this app also “am”, “is” or “are going to” + a base form. English has no future ending, so a helper always carries it. “Marta will arrive late.” “It won’t rain today.”
Taught on Tense

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G

Gerund: An “-ing” verb form used as a noun. The name is a false friend: the Spanish “gerundio” is never a noun, and where English uses a gerund, Spanish uses the infinitive. The parser usually tags a gerund VBG, the same tag as a participle, so the tag cannot tell them apart; the word’s job can. A gerund alone as the subject is often tagged NN instead, like “Swimming” in the first example. “Swimming keeps her fit.” “He enjoys cooking.”
Taught on Gerunds
Gerund phrase: The gerund plus its own objects and modifiers, filling one noun slot together; a lone gerund is a one-word gerund phrase. The Roles exercise pairs it with the slot it fills — Subject, Direct object, Object of preposition. “Rescuing the kitten took an hour.” “She dislikes waiting in queues.”
Taught on Gerunds
Going-to future: “am”, “is” or “are” + “going to” + a base form. The Tense filter reads it as one future. Reed-Kellogg and the Roles exercise show “is going” as the verb phrase and the rest as a complementary infinitive phrase. “Diego is going to buy flowers.” “They are going to move to Cali.”
Taught on Tense

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H

Head: The main word of a phrase. Delete the other words, and the head can still do the job of the whole phrase. In a dependency tree, every word except the root has exactly one head. In “the tired birds”, the head is “birds”. A phrase can hold a smaller one. In “very tired birds”, “tired” is the head of “very tired”. That group modifies “birds”, the head of the whole phrase.
Taught on Grammar Basics · Dependency Parsing

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I

Imperative: A command, made with the base form of the verb. Its subject is usually an understood “you”: Reed-Kellogg writes it as “x” in the subject slot (or as “(you)”), and the dependency tree leaves it out. “Shut the door.” “Please wait here.” — in both, the doer is the person addressed.
Taught on Imperatives & Conjunctions
Imperative mood: The mood of commands and requests: the base form, usually with no subject. It has no tense. “Don’t open the window.” “Sit next to Priya.”
Taught on Mood
Imperative sentence: A command or request. The verb is in its base form, and the subject “you” is usually left unsaid. “Shut the window.” “Please hand me the map.”
Taught on Sentence Types & Voice
Indefinite pronoun: A pronoun that does not point to a particular person or thing — “everyone”, “something”, “nobody”. Words like these are PRON on the coarse scale but NN on the fine one. “Nobody noticed the mistake.” “She heard something outside.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns
Independent clause: A clause that can stand alone as a sentence. Every sentence has at least one. The Roles exercise boxes it as a Main clause, with any clause that depends on it inside. “The sun rose.” “We packed the car, and the dog jumped in.” — two of them, joined.
Taught on Compound-Complex Sentences
Indicative mood: The ordinary mood of statements and questions about real or possible things. Real conditions and most modal verb phrases are indicative too. “Our team won the match.” “Will it rain tomorrow?”
Taught on Mood
Indirect object: Who or what receives the direct object. On a horizontal beneath the verb; relation dative. “She gave Luis a postcard.” “Show me the map.”
Taught on Indirect Objects & Complements · Core Arguments
Indirect question: A question placed inside a sentence as a noun clause, in statement word order: the subject comes before the verb, with no extra “do”, “does” or “did”. It starts with a “wh-” word, or with “whether” or “if” for a yes-or-no question. “Nobody knows what Omar wants.” “I don’t know whether the museum is free.”
Taught on Noun Clauses
Infinitive: “To” plus the base form of a verb. It carries no tense, so it cannot head a clause on its own. The “to” is tagged TO, relation aux. Without “to”, it is a bare infinitive. “She wants to leave.” “To forgive takes courage.”
Taught on Infinitives
Infinitive phrase: The infinitive with its own objects and modifiers, working as one unit. A lone infinitive is a one-word infinitive phrase. When the phrase fills a slot, the Roles exercise adds that slot’s label: Subject, Direct object, Pred. nominative, Pred. adjective, Obj. complement or Appositive. “She wants to leave early.” “To own her own car has long been her desire.”
Taught on Infinitives
Intensifier: An adverb that makes another word stronger or weaker — “very”, “rather”, “quite”. Tagged RB before an adjective or adverb. “The soup is very hot.” “She left rather early.”
Taught on Adjectives & Adverbs
Interjection: An exclamation outside the sentence’s grammar — “oh”, “wow”, “please”. INTJ/UH. “Oh, the ferry left.” “Please hand me the map.”
Taught on Numbers, Symbols & the Rest
Interrogative sentence: A question. Usually an auxiliary comes before the subject, and the sentence ends in a question mark. “Did the ferry leave on time?” “Where does the ferry stop?”
Taught on Sentence Types & Voice
Inversion: Moving an auxiliary in front of the subject to form a question. Undone in the Reed-Kellogg diagram, preserved in the dependency tree. “She can swim.” → “Can she swim?” “They have left.” → “Have they left?”
Taught on Modal Auxiliaries

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L

Lemma: The dictionary form of a word: “watched” → “watch”, “foxes” → “fox”. Grammify records it for every word, but no exercise asks for it. “The foxes watched us.” has the lemmas “the, fox, watch, we”. “She is running late.” has “she, be, run, late”.
Taught on Parts of Speech
Level: A word’s distance from the root, which sets its row in the tree. The levels come from the complete parse, so in the exercise the tree does not move as you answer. “Birds sing.” — “sing” is level 0, “birds” level 1. “The tired birds slept.” — “the” and “tired” sit at level 2, one row below “birds”.
Taught on Dependency Parsing
Linking verb: A verb that joins the subject to a word that names or describes the subject, instead of acting on something. The main one is “be”; others are “become, get, grow, turn, remain, stay, seem, appear, look, feel, smell, sound, taste”. “Omar stayed calm.” “The leaves turned red.”
Taught on Subjective Complements

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M

Main verb: The verb that carries the clause’s meaning. VERB on the coarse scale, whatever its form. “She has a car.” — “has” is the main verb. “She has finished.” — now it is “finished”.
Taught on Verbs & Auxiliaries
Mass noun: An uncountable noun — “sand”, “happiness”. Tagged NN like a singular, because it behaves like one. “Sand filled her shoes.” “She wished us happiness.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns
Modal auxiliary: One of nine helping verbs (“can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would”) that add ability, permission, possibility, obligation, advice or prediction. It comes first in its verb phrase, and the next verb is a base form. Tagged MD; in the tree it hangs from the main verb as aux. “You must leave now.” “It might rain later.”
Taught on Modal Auxiliaries
Modality: The meaning a modal verb adds: ability, possibility, permission or obligation. It is not a mood in this app; a modal verb phrase is indicative unless it sits in a “wish” or “if only” clause. “You must show your ticket.” “The children may leave early.”
Taught on Mood
Modifier: A word or phrase that adds detail to another word without being required by it. Drawn on a slanted line beneath the word it modifies. “The tired birds slept.” — “tired” modifies “birds”. “Birds sing loudly.” — “loudly” modifies “sing”.
Taught on Grammar Basics · Modifier Relations
Mood: The form of a verb phrase that shows how the speaker presents its clause: as a fact or a question (indicative), as unreal or required (subjunctive), or as a command (imperative). “The bakery opens at seven.” “I wish it were summer.” “Wait for me!”
Taught on Mood
Morphology: In linguistics, the study of word forms. In Grammify it means the grammatical features that come with a word’s fine tag, such as Tense=Past or Number=Sing. Grammify records them for every word, but no exercise asks for them. “She sings.” — VBZ gives Tense=Pres and Person=3. “They sang.” — VBD gives Tense=Past.
Taught on Parts of Speech

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N

Non-finite verb: An infinitive, gerund or participle — a verb form carrying no tense, which needs a finite verb elsewhere in the sentence to anchor it. “The kettle began to whistle.” — an infinitive, anchored by “began”. “The whistling kettle woke us.” — a participle, anchored by “woke”.
Taught on Grammar Basics
Noun clause: A dependent clause filling a noun slot. In the tree its verb is the csubj of the main verb when the clause is the subject. Otherwise it is usually the ccomp of a verb or adjective, the pcomp of a preposition, or the acl of a noun such as “fact”. “Everyone knows that the ferry left.” — object. “Whoever arrives first will unlock the door.” — subject.
Taught on Noun Clauses
Noun phrase: A noun together with every word below it in the tree. A dependency tree draws no box around it: start at the noun and collect every word under it. “The old kettle whistled.” “She bought a map of the coast.”
Taught on Nominal Dependents

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O

Object of the preposition: The noun phrase after the preposition: “the sofa”, not just “sofa”. Its main word goes on the horizontal, with its modifiers on slants below. In the tree, pobj marks only that main word. The object is that word plus every word that hangs from it, a nested phrase included. In “at the edge of the field”, the object of “at” is “the edge of the field”. “She sat on the sofa.” “A letter from my aunt arrived.”
Taught on Prepositional Phrases
Objective complement: Like a subjective complement, but it names or describes the direct object, not the subject. It follows a backslash that comes after the object and points back to it. “They painted the fence white.” “The judges called the dance a success.”
Taught on Subjective Complements · Indirect Objects & Complements
Open clause: A subordinate clause with no subject of its own, borrowing one from the clause above. The reason xcomp is called an “open” clausal complement. “She wants to leave.” — “she” is understood as the one leaving. “They began to sing.”
Taught on Core Arguments
Original value: The parser’s first answer for a word, which Grammify keeps even after a person corrects it. Exercises always grade the corrected value, never this one. “Children, we must hurry.” — the parser said npadvmod; the corrected value is vocative. “Two students were made co-captains.” — NN on “co”, corrected to AFX.
Taught on Root & Other Relations

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P

Part of speech: A word’s class, decided by the job it does in its sentence: noun, verb, adjective, adverb and so on. Grammify uses seventeen of them, the coarse POS categories. One spelling can change class: “The guards watch the gate.” — a verb. “My watch stopped at noon.” — a noun.
Taught on Parts of Speech
Participial phrase: A participle with its own objects and modifiers. Usually it modifies one noun; after a linking verb or a direct object it completes the verb instead, as a predicate adjective or an objective complement. “Sitting in the corner, the boys laughed.” “Boxes stacked in the closet fell.”
Taught on Participles
Participle: A verb form that can also modify a noun. The present participle is VBG. The past participle is usually VBN, but one used as an ordinary adjective before its noun is often tagged JJ. “The sleeping baby smiled.” “A lost dog followed us home.”
Taught on Verbs & Auxiliaries
Particle: Part of a phrasal verb, labelled prt. Distinguished from a preposition by having no object of its own. “The plane took off.” “She looked the word up.”
Taught on Function Word Relations
Passive progressive: “be” + “being” + past participle. It occurs almost only in the present and the past tense. “The stadium is being painted.” “Our car was being washed.”
Taught on Tense & Aspect Chart
Past participle: The “-ed”/“-en” form used as an adjective. Also the form used in the perfect and the passive. Usually tagged VBN, but one that has become an ordinary adjective is often tagged JJ, like “broken” below. “The broken vase lay on the floor.” “Boxes stacked in the closet fell.”
Taught on Participles
Past tense: The tense of a verb phrase whose first word is a past form (VBD): an “-ed” form, an irregular past, “was”, “were”, “had” or “did”. Two exceptions have no tense: “had better” and “was” or “were going to” + a verb. “The shop closed early.” “Santiago did not call.”
Taught on Tense
Pedestal (a stand): A stem with a small triangle at its foot, lifting a phrase or clause above the base line. It means “this whole group of words fills one slot”, and its foot stands in that slot. “Feeding the ducks calms Omar.” — the gerund phrase stands on a pedestal in the subject slot. “She knows that we left.” — the whole clause stands on one in the object slot, after the half vertical. A pedestal right after the verb, with no mark in front of it, holds a complementary infinitive, as in “has to leave”.
Taught on Reed-Kellogg Diagrams · Infinitives · Noun Clauses
Perfect aspect: “have” + a past participle: completed before a reference point, or true from an earlier time up to it (with “since” or “for”). “The rain has stopped.” “By eight, the guests had left.”
Taught on Aspect
Perfect progressive aspect: “have” + “been” + an “-ing” form: in progress up to a reference point. Also called the perfect continuous. “We have been walking for an hour.” “Priya has been learning Korean.”
Taught on Aspect
Personal pronoun: “I, you, he, she, it, we, they” and their object and reflexive forms. All PRP; the dependency label, not the tag, shows whether one is a subject or an object. “She called him.” “We found it ourselves.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns
Phrasal verb: A verb plus a particle acting as one unit — “take off”, “give up”. The particle is RP. “The plane took off late.” “She looked the word up.”
Taught on Determiners & Function Words
Phrase: A group of words acting as a single unit, with no subject-and-verb pair of its own. “the tired birds”, “at night”, “had been waiting”. “The tired birds slept.” — the first three words fill the subject slot together.
Taught on Grammar Basics
POS (coarse): The coarse category, one of seventeen. They come from Universal Dependencies, a project that uses the same categories for many languages. This is what the POS exercise asks for. “The kettle whistled.” — DET, NOUN, VERB. “She left quickly.” — PRON, VERB, ADV.
Taught on Parts of Speech
Possessive: A noun or pronoun that says who something belongs to. A time word can be possessive too, and then it says when. In the tree its relation is poss, and the “’s” is a separate token with the relation case. “Omar’s coat is here.” “Today’s class starts late.”
Taught on Possessives & Appositives
Possessive pronoun: “my, your, his, her, its, our, their”, used before a noun. Many textbooks call them possessive adjectives (“adjetivos posesivos”) or possessive determiners. They are tagged PRP$ and drawn on a slant like any other possessive. The forms that stand alone, such as “mine” and “hers”, replace a whole noun phrase, so they take a slot of their own instead of a slant. “Her coat is here.” “They lost their map.”
Taught on Possessives & Appositives
Possessor: Labelled poss, and attached to the thing owned. A “’s” is a separate token carrying its own case arc. “Omar’s coat is here.” “Her coat is here.”
Taught on Nominal Dependents
Predicate: What the clause says about its subject: the verb plus every word that belongs with it. It sits right of the full vertical line. “Birds sing.” — just the verb. “The kettle whistled on the stove.” — the verb and its phrase.
Taught on Grammar Basics · Subjects & Verbs
Predicate adjective: An adjective — or an equivalent phrase — completing a linking verb and describing the subject. Relation acomp for an adjective (oprd after “seem” or “appear”). “The soup smells wonderful.” “The road was icy.”
Taught on Subjective Complements · Adjectives & Adverbs
Predicate nominative: A noun — or a phrase or clause doing a noun’s job — completing a linking verb and renaming the subject. Relation attr for a noun. “She became a pilot.” “My brother is an engineer.”
Taught on Subjective Complements
Preposition: A word relating a noun to the rest of the sentence. Tagged IN, relation prep. Coarse category ADP. “She sat on the chair.” “We walked through the park after lunch.”
Taught on Prepositional Phrases · Determiners & Function Words
Prepositional phrase: A preposition together with its object. It does the job of an adjective or an adverb. “We waited for the bus.” “The man in the blue coat left before lunch.”
Taught on Prepositional Phrases
Present participle: The “-ing” form used as an adjective, and the form used in the progressive. Tagged VBG, like a gerund, so the tag alone cannot tell you which it is. “The whistling kettle woke us.” “People sitting in the corner laughed.”
Taught on Participles
Present tense: The tense of a verb phrase whose first word is a present form: VBZ with “he”, “she” and “it” (“works”, “is”, “has”), and VBP with other subjects (“work”, “am”, “are”). “The office opens at eight.” “My parents live in Manizales.”
Taught on Tense
Progressive aspect: “be” + an “-ing” form: in progress at a reference point. Also called the continuous. “Nina is writing an email.” “At eight, we were having dinner.”
Taught on Aspect
Proper noun: A name. Capitalised in English, and the capital is the parser’s main clue. NNP singular, NNPS plural. “Marta flies for Avianca.” “The Alps were snowy.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns

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R

Reference point: The moment a sentence looks from. The perfect is completed before it, and the progressive is in progress at it. “When Omar arrived, Marta had painted the kitchen.” “At eight, we were having dinner.”
Taught on Aspect
Relative adverb: “where”, “when” or “why” introducing an adjective clause, with an adverb’s job inside it. Drawn on a dashed slant from the noun down to the clause’s verb, which it modifies. “That is the year when the bridge closed.” “We found the hotel where they stayed.”
Taught on Adjective Clauses
Relative clause: The main kind of adjective clause: one introduced by a relative pronoun — “who, whom, whose, which, that” — or by none at all. “We met the guide who found the trail.” “The violin she inherited needs new strings.” — the “that” is left out.
Taught on Adjective Clauses · Modifier Relations
Relative pronoun: “who, whom, whose, which, that” — introduces the clause and, at the same time, fills a slot inside it. “The violin that she inherited” — “that” is the object of “inherited”. “The guide who found the trail” — “who” is its subject.
Taught on Adjective Clauses
Restrictive clause: A clause that tells you which one is meant, written without commas; many course books call it a “defining” clause. A non-restrictive (“non-defining”) clause only adds detail, is separated from the sentence by commas and never starts with “that”. “The violin that she inherited needs strings.” — restrictive: it says which violin. “My violin, which she inherited, needs strings.” — non-restrictive: it adds detail about a violin already identified.
Taught on Adjective Clauses
Retained object: The direct object that stays after a passive verb when the indirect object has become the subject. “She was given a medal.” — “medal” is still a direct object (dobj). “We were told the truth.”
Taught on Adverbial Objectives & Retained Objects
Root: The one word that depends on no other word; the parser records it as its own head. Usually the main verb. “Birds sing.” — the root is “sing”. “The kettle had been whistling.” — the root is “whistling”, not either auxiliary.
Taught on Dependency Parsing · Root & Other Relations

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S

Sentence normalisation: The clean-up Grammify applies to a sentence before parsing it. Every run of spaces, tabs or line breaks becomes one space, and the ends are trimmed, so whitespace never becomes _SP here. “Our bus is late.” typed with two spaces is parsed with one. “Call me tomorrow.” typed with a line break inside is parsed with a space instead.
Taught on Numbers, Symbols & the Rest
Shared object: One direct object that belongs to two verbs joined by “and”. A tree gives the object only one head, so an editor marks the sharing by hand. “Barbara mowed and watered the lawn.” “He washed and dried the plates.”
Taught on Miscellaneous
Signal word: A time word or phrase that often comes with one form, such as “yesterday” with the simple past or “since” with the perfect. It is a hint, not a rule. “I saw Diego yesterday.” “Nina has lived here since 2019.”
Taught on Tense & Aspect Chart
Simple aspect: No perfect helper and no progressive helper: the action as a whole. Verb phrases with “do”, “does”, “did” or “will” + only the main verb are simple too. “Pedro drinks coffee every morning.” “Carlos did not cook dinner.”
Taught on Aspect
Simple sentence: One independent clause and no dependent clause. Two verbs that share one subject are still one clause. “Our train left on time.” “Diego ironed his shirt and left for work.”
Taught on Compound-Complex Sentences
Stative verb: A verb that names a state, not an action, such as “know”, “own”, “like” or “want”. It rarely takes the progressive. “I know the answer.” “Diego owns two bikes.”
Taught on Aspect
Subject: What the clause is about — the answer to “who?” or “what?” in front of the verb. It sits left of the full vertical line. “Birds sing.” “The old kettle whistled.” — the subject can be one word or a whole phrase.
Taught on Grammar Basics · Subjects & Verbs
Subjective complement: The word or phrase after a linking verb that names or describes the subject: a predicate nominative or a predicate adjective. It follows a backslash on the base line. “The museum was quiet.” “Santiago became the team captain.”
Taught on Subjective Complements
Subjunctive mood: The mood of things presented as unreal, wished for or required. Its forms are a base form after a demand, “were” with “I”, “he”, “she” or “it”, a past form in an unreal clause, and a few fixed phrases. “The nurse asks that visitors be quiet.” “If I had wings, I would fly home.”
Taught on Mood
Subordinating conjunction: The word that introduces a dependent clause. Coarse category SCONJ, relation mark (but “when” and “where” are advmod). “We left because it rained.” “Although it was late, she kept reading.”
Taught on Adverb Clauses · Determiners & Function Words
Subordinator: A short name for a subordinating conjunction. In a noun clause it is “that”, “whether” or “if”: it introduces the clause and has no job inside it. Some grammars call these words expletives. Relation mark. “Everyone knows that the ferry left.” “Ask whether the shop is open.”
Taught on Noun Clauses
Symbol: A meaningful non-word character — “$”, “x” between numbers. Unevenly recognised; the percent sign is a noun to the parser. “Tickets cost $12.” “The room is 3 x 4 metres.”
Taught on Numbers, Symbols & the Rest

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T

TAG (fine): The Penn Treebank label, for English only. It adds the details of form that the coarse category leaves out: number, tense, person and degree. This is what the Tags exercise asks for. “The kettle whistled.” — DT, NN, VBD: a singular noun and a past-tense verb. “Kettles whistle.” — NNS, VBP.
Taught on Parts of Speech
Tense: The form of a verb phrase that usually places an event in the past, the present or the future. It sits on the first word of the phrase. It is a form, not a time. “Nina works at night.” “Nina worked at night.”
Taught on Tense
Tense-aspect form: One cell of the chart: a tense together with an aspect, such as the present perfect. Many course books call the twelve cells “the twelve tenses”. “The bakery has opened.” — present perfect. “Our neighbours were dancing.” — past progressive.
Taught on Tense & Aspect Chart
Token: One unit as the parser counts them — usually a word, but a contraction splits into two (“can’t” is “ca” + “n’t”) because the halves behave differently, and each punctuation mark is a token too. “We can’t stay.” has five tokens, counting the full stop, but three words. “Omar’s coat is here.” has six tokens: “Omar” and “’s” are counted separately, and so is the full stop.
Taught on Grammar Basics
Token split: The parser splits “Omar’s” and “can’t” into two tokens each, because their halves do different jobs. A Reed-Kellogg diagram writes each of them as one word, but in the POS, Tags and Dependencies exercises you label each half. “Santiago’s cat won’t eat.” — six tokens (“wo” + “n’t” for “won’t”). “It’s Rosa’s turn.” — five tokens, and the two “’s” are different words: “is”, then the possessive ending.
Taught on Possessives & Appositives
Transitional adverb: An adverb that joins its clause to the one before: “however”, “therefore”, “moreover”, “consequently”. Drawn on a slant under its own clause’s verb, not floating like a disjunct. “The hotel was old. However, the rooms were clean.” “Santiago missed the last train. He therefore took a taxi.”
Taught on Adverbs
Transitive verb: A verb that takes a direct object. One that does not is “intransitive”; many English verbs are both, depending on the sentence. “She bought apples.” — transitive. “She slept.” — intransitive. “She read the letter.” and “She read all night.” — the same verb both ways.
Taught on Articles, Adjectives & Objects
Transitivity: How many objects a verb takes in a given sentence: none (intransitive), one (monotransitive) or two (ditransitive). A linking verb takes a complement instead. “She slept.” — none. “She read the letter.” — one. “She gave him the letter.” — two.
Taught on Miscellaneous

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U

Understood subject: The “you” that a command means but does not say. A Reed-Kellogg diagram writes it as “x” in the subject slot; some diagrams write “(you)” instead. In “Wait here.” and “Please hand me the map.” the understood subject is “you”, drawn as “x”.
Taught on Sentence Types & Voice
Unreal condition: An “if” clause about something that is not true or did not happen, with “would”, “could” or “might” in the other clause. Its verb phrase is subjunctive and keeps its tense, unless it is a modal verb phrase. “If I had a dog, I would walk it every day.” “If they had left earlier, they would have caught the bus.”
Taught on Mood

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V

Verb phrase: The main verb with its helping verbs, plus “not” or “never” when they go with it; its first verb is finite. A clause has one, or one per verb when the predicate is compound. It fills one slot on the base line, however many words it has. A verbal is not a verb phrase. “The kettle was whistling.” — two words, one slot. “Windows had been cleaned.” — three words, one slot.
Taught on Subjects & Verbs · Modal Auxiliaries
Verbal: A verb form used as another part of speech. The three are infinitives, gerunds and participles. “She wants to leave.” — an infinitive. “Swimming keeps her fit.” — a gerund. “The whistling kettle woke us.” — a participle.
Taught on Gerunds
Verbal phrase: An infinitive, gerund or participial phrase: a verbal with its own objects and modifiers, but no subject and no tense. Modern grammars call the same unit a non-finite clause. “She hopes to visit Lisbon.” “Rescuing the kitten took an hour.”
Taught on Grammar Basics
Vocative: The person being addressed. Grammatically outside the clause, so it floats on an unconnected line above the diagram. “Close the window, Omar.” “We are ready, everyone.”
Taught on Imperatives & Conjunctions
Voice: Whether the subject performs the action (active) or receives it (passive). Active: “The storm flooded the road.” Passive: “The road was flooded by the storm.”
Taught on Sentence Types & Voice · Subjects & Verbs

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W

Wh-pronoun: A pronoun that begins with “wh-”: “who”, “whom” and “what” when no noun follows it (all WP), “which” (WDT), and “whose” (WP$, but DET on the coarse scale). It asks a question or opens a relative clause. “Who borrowed my umbrella?” “The singer whose voice we heard is from Cali.”
Taught on Nouns & Pronouns
Word: The smallest unit that can stand on its own. Every word belongs to a part-of-speech category. “Birds sing loudly.” is three words from three categories; “the tired birds” is three words doing the job of one.
Taught on Grammar Basics

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X

xcomp: “Open clausal complement” — the relation for an infinitive completing another verb, with its subject supplied by the main clause. “She wants to leave.” — “leave” is the xcomp of “wants”. “They began to sing.”
Taught on Infinitives

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