Insights Standards

Language is as much of an art as it is a science, and grammarians will sometimes have differing opinions on certain grammar topics. The content you read on this encyclopedia or on Insights to English’s main site might explain things in a different way or even use different terms from what you might encounter in other sources. First of all, that’s okay; it doesn’t mean they’re incompatible. But on this page, we present the standards that we hold ourselves to which also may explain why our content is a little different.

There are many different frameworks we can use to view grammar and understand how it works. Most of the common textbooks align with traditional (or classic) linguistics, which is based on how parent languages are used (for English, those are primarily Greek, Romantic, and Germanic languages) and expresses how grammar should be used. While there is certainly merit in traditional grammar, modern theories place more emphasis on how grammar is used by peoples today.

Insights draws a lot of our standards from Cognitive Linguistics; we see communication as a reflection of what we perceive and how we think.

An example of where this distinction is brought to light is with Gerunds. According to traditional grammar, Gerunds are separate from Active Participles. However, we consider Gerunds to be a subset of Active Participles. Because verb forms with the -ing suffix all express action or activity, we find it important to highlight that connection among them. By identifying the commonalities between Gerunds, -ing Verb Patterns, Continuous Tenses, and Active Adjectives, we gain a deeper understanding of how a word’s form reflects its meaning.

We find it important to acknowledge both a word’s meaning and its function. And when the two don’t align, we don’t ignore one, but call attention to both. For example, a substantive adjective is lexically an adjective, yet it functions as a noun. Throughout this encyclopedia, you’ll see that we reference nominals, verbs, modifiers, and linkers, which all have to do with the function of a word, phrase, or clause regardless of their lexical meaning.

Insights materials are designed primarily for educators. We seek to bridge the gap between the linguist and the teacher. That means we’ve done research on the linguistic side to gain a better understanding of grammar, but we present those “insights” in a way that makes sense for teachers.

This sometimes plays into a discrepancy in terminology. The most significant example is the term tense. To a linguist, tense is only the time reference, and it depends upon the form of the verb (limited to past or non-past); but in education, tense is the combination of time reference and aspect, and it reflects the speaker’s meaning, regardless of verb form (and includes a dozen different options). While Insights to English sees the value in the linguists’ perspective, we consistently use the term tense to refer to the feature of verb construction that includes both time frame and aspect, since that it what teachers and students are familiar with.

That said, Insights also includes topics or terminology that may be less familiar to many educators, but we do so because we believe they are beneficial for deepening our understanding of certain grammar points (see Emblematic Terminology below). Here again we define things in such a way that is easier for teachers to both understand and apply.

Beyond terminology, the teacher’s perspective plays a big role in how we explain various aspects of grammar topics. While other encyclopedias read like technical manuals or scientific papers in their articles on grammar topics, Insightsopedia is far more user-friendly.

Some concepts or elements have multiple names. At Insightsopedia, we opt to use the terms that best represent the critical features of that concept, its typical applications, or what the concept has in common with related concepts.

For instance, we use the term Perfect Participle in place of Past Participle because the later is misleading: it does not consistently indicate a past meaning. Meanwhile, the former term indicates when and how it is used, including as key marker of perfect tenses. Similarly, we call -ed adjectives Passive Adjectives because it establishes commonality with Passive Voice.

For another example, the main clause of a sentence has been traditionally called an “independent clause”. However, main clauses might be dependent upon subordinate clauses (including Content Clauses or even essential Adverbial Clauses) in order to complete their sentences. Therefore, “independent clause” is a misnomer, and we generally avoid that term on all Insights resources.

Any time you see a term that might be unfamiliar to you, even if you’re a long-time English teacher, consider the inherit meaning of that term and whether it does a better job of representing its concept than any of its other terms. The term that helps English learners understand the concept the most is the term we prefer to use.

The primary purpose of language is effective communication. English has a number of guidelines that are sometimes referred to as ‘grammar rules’ (though that phrasing may be misleading) which are commonly broken by native speakers. Ideas like not splitting an Infinitive are either outmoded or based on misunderstandings, so we don’t regard them as true linguistic standards. Anyway, if breaking those ‘rules’ results in better communication, then Insights to English is all for it!

We’re not above ending a sentence with a preposition, starting a sentence with a conjunction, or using ‘they’ (instead of ‘he/she’) for unknown persons. We also capitalize grammar topics; in most contexts, it probably would not make sense to do so, … but in this encyclopedia, grammar topics are treated like royalty (by which we mean proper nouns).

You might notice that we present the standard auxiliary verbs in all caps (BE, HAVE, and DO). We do this because auxiliary verbs are immensely important and we want to clearly differentiate them from the more descriptive elements of a paragraph.

A Few Specifics

There might be a few terms that raise some eyebrows. Here, we hope to communicate (1) that our use of these is quite intentional, and (2) any further clarification that may be needed. Furthermore, there are some concepts that we teach that may differ from traditional grammar explanations. But we do so having put in the research to understand these concepts, and to categorize or present them in a way that we believe should make more sense to educators and learners.

Terms

We’ve coined the term ‘Leading Auxiliary‘ as the first auxiliary verb in a verb string. These words play such an important role in a variety of grammar topics that they needed a special term to identify them.
The term ‘Verb String‘ is not one we made up, though it’s not very common. We use it to represent the verb; its tense, mood, and voice; but not any of its modifiers except for negators. We feel this best captures the core meaning of the clause’s verb phrase.
‘Crux‘ is a term we admittedly developed for a particular kind of linker: the content subordinator (introducing Content Clauses). The concept itself is nothing particularly new, but ‘crux’ is both more meaningful and easier to remember than ‘complementizer’.
The lexical class (part of speech) traditionally called ‘Prepositions’ is now called ‘Adpositions‘. Prepositions is one subset of Adpositions, albeit the largest by far. Adpositions include not only prepositions, but also postpositions, circumpositions, and the particles of Phrasal Verbs.
The term ‘Host Clause‘ is not commonly found outside of Insights resources, but we use it as the counterpart to ‘embedded clause‘. This term is distinct from ‘main clause’ since any host clause (a clause that contains an embedded clause) could also be an embedded clause itself.
‘Perfect Modals‘ are modal verbs followed by ‘have’, which denote either a past tense or an unreal mood, depending on the modal flavor. This is nothing new, but Insights has finally put a name to the concept.

Concepts

Participles are defined by their form and their generic meaning, regardless of part-of-speech. By this constraint, every word with a verb as its root and an -ing suffix is an Active Participle if it conveys and active meaning, and nearly every word with a verb as its root and an -ed/en suffix is a Perfect or Passive Participle if it focuses more on results than on the initiation or the action.
We use the mnemonic acronym BOTANY instead of FANBOYS for the common Coordinating Conjunctions because for and so should not be included, while then should be.
Insights considers the Habitual Mood to be a subset of the realis mood. First, it deserves to be considered its own mood since it has designators (like ‘used to’) that clearly indicate habit. Second, it doesn’t make sense as an irrealis mood, given that it expresses true and actualized actions, events, or states. There’s no reason that the Indicative Mood should be the only realis mood.
The system of 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, etc. Conditionals is unnecessary. We simplify it down to two factors: when would it take place, and is it real or unreal?