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CONSONANTS

Consonants are produced when there is either a closure or narrowing of the air passage in the oral cavity. For example, /t/ is pronounced with the front of the tongue pushing against the palate. The 24 consonants in English are listed below: Consonants are further classified in terms of how the sounds are made: Plosives: Plosive sounds are produced when the vocal tract is blocked, building up air pressure, and then the air stream is abruptly released.  Fricatives: In the production of fricatives, airstream is directed through a narrow construction in the vocal tract. Nasals: In the production of nasal sounds, air flows through the nasal cavity.   Affricates: Affricates begin as stops and conclude as fricatives. Consonant Clusters : Consonant clusters are groups of two or more consonants sounds that come before, after or between vowel sounds. Look at a few examples below:

ROOT FORMS OF WORDS

The process of making new words from a base or root from (or the most basic form of a word, without anything attached to it, which you will find in a dictionary) is known as word formation, and understanding how this works will help us build our vocabulary by deriving many new words according to our needs. Many words that we use come from a root word. If we disconnect prefixes and suffixes, the root can be identified. A little digging will uncover just what the root word really means. For example, in a word such as 'bicycle', the root what is 'cycle'. Since English is a derivational language, it has borrowed many words from other languages especially from Greek and Latin roots. (A 'root' is a form of a word from which other words are derived using affixes.) For example, pater (or patr) is a Latin word which means 'father'. It serves as root for English words such as 'patriarch', 'patrimony', 'patron', etc. DETERMINING A R...

PRONOUNS

Pronouns are words such as he, her, your, it and this used in place of nouns or noun phrases. They are of the following types. Personal pronouns stand for the speaker (first person), the person spoken to (second person), and the person, animal, place or thing that is neither the speaker not the spoken to (third person). In English, the personal pronouns used as subjects in sentences are I, we, you, he, she, they and it . The corresponding personal pronouns used as objects are me, us, you, him, her, them and it . Possessive pronouns are used in place of nouns with an apostrophe and -s, such as Suma's, to indicate the meaning of belonging or possession. They are mine, ours, yours, his, her and theirs . Examples are This is not Shireen's file. The bag is not Smita's; hers is larger. Reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and the object of a verb (or preposition) both refer to the same person, animal, place or thing, for example, myself, ourselves, yourself, ...