Teach English in HongguAn Zhen - Maoming Shi

This grammar unit covered Modal Auxiliary verbs, Passive/Active voice, Clauses and Phrasal verbs. Modal verbs are verbs which are put before main verbs to add meaning. They can imply obligation, probability, permission, potential ability etc. as well as convey differing levels of politeness. Eg: \"May I have a drink\" as opposed to \"Can I have a drink?\". Passive and Active voice is a concept in which we place the focus of the sentence differently depending on what we want to emphasize. In Active voice, we focus on the agent of the action whereas in passive we focus on the action more so than the agent (the doer of the action). A clause is a group of words containing a subject and a verb. I was initially confused by the idea of defining relative clauses and the idea that they don't require commas. This made more sense in thinking about the example \"my girlfriend who lives at 35 was arrested\". If you were to include commas, the part about her address is more like an informative addition which isn't pertinent to defining which girlfriend we are talking about. In using commas, the clause is there for the purpose of defining which (out of several) girlfriends we mean. Finally, Phrasal verbs are multi word combinations which include particles and operate together to give meaning. Examples include: bought out, broke out, got on, took off etc. I use these commonly in my every day speech but never could before put a term to the concept. They come in 3 types - Intransitive, Transitive separable and Transitive inseparable. Inseparable phrasal verbs cannot have the particle removed from the verb - \"She got over the operation\" cannot be changed to \"She got the operation over\". Intransitive phrasal verbs cannot be followed by a direct object. I'm still a little unclear on the transitive/intransitive concept but I will continue to study it until I have a clearer understanding.