Classwork Exercise and Series (English Language- JSS2): Intonation, Passive Voice and Adjective

Contents:

Intonation & Stress

Language Structure: The Passive Voice

Part of Speech: Adjective

Intonation

Falling Tune

The  WH- questions all use the falling tune. In these examples, the stresses syllables are printed in capitals:

WHEN will you be ↓LEAVing?
I’ll be LEAVing at  ↓EIGHT.

As you see, the voice goes down on the last stressed syllable.

The rising tune in yes/no questions

Rising tune is used when asking yes/no questions. With this type of question, the voice gradually goes down until the last stressed syllable, when it goes sharply up. For example:

Did they
             CATCH the B^US?

Of course, the answer to this question, like any other ordinary statement, uses the falling tune.

Listen and repeat:

Did they enJOY the FILM?
                               YES, very MUCH.

Have you reTURNED his BOOK?
                                    NO, I HAVEn’t.

Are you GOing HOME?
                          YES, we ARE.

Is he any GOOD at FOOTball?
                    YES, but he’s BETTer at BOXing!

Are they enJOYing the DANCE?
                                       NO, they AREn’t.

Spoken English: More on Stress

Three-syllable words

In words of three syllables, the main stress usually falls on the first syllable or the second syllable, sometimes on the third. Say the following, giving the stress to the syllable shown in capital letters:

First syllable stressed

FAmily
ANything
SUpervise
DIFferent
FACtory
EDucate
ANcestor
INterview
URgently

Second syllable stressed

toGETHer
deVELop
comMITTee
reMEMber
fiNANcial
sucCESSful

Third syllable stressed

UnderSTAND
afterNOON
disaGREE

More on stress in sentences

Can you remember which parts of speech are stressed?

Auxiliary verbs are among the words that are usually NOT stressed. For example:
I have ALWAYS LIVED in the RURal ARea.

As you can see, have, an auxiliary verb in this sentence, is not stressed.

But sometimes such verbs ARE stressed:

• when they come at the beginning of a question.
• when they come at the end of a statement

An example of each comes in this dialogue:

A: DOES your BROther LIKE STAYing in Kano?
B: ↓YES, he ↓DOES.

Notice also that B uses falling tune for yes and does.

In pairs, practise saying the following  dialogues. This time, stressed syllables are underlined.

1.   A: Were both your parents born in Lagos?
      B: Yes, they were. 

2.   A: Would you like to go outside Nigeria?
      B: Yes, I would.

3.    A: I hear that Abuja is a very expensive place.
       B: That’s right. It is.

Language Structure: The Passive Voice

Very often when we use English verb, we use them in the passive ‘voice’ (or we can say that we use their passive forms). Here is an everyday example:

Our assignments have all been marked.

Here, something has happened to the assignments – they have all been marked.  They have not done anything! And we do  not know who marked them! If we want to say who marked them, namely the teacher, we use not a passive sentence but an active sentence:

The teacher has marked all our assignments.

You should already be quite comfortable with using active sentences.

So, generally, we use the passive voice action done, not about the person doing it. This is very clear in the first example above.

To form the passive voice, we use

• a tense or form of the verb be (am, is, are, was, were, is, being, have been, etc); PLUS
• the past participle of a verb (marked, eaten, found, built )

Sometimes we can use the passive when we want to avoid getting into trouble! Listen to this story:

One day, a boy called Tricky Micky
threw a ball to a friend inside the
classroom, and broke a window. At
that moment the teacher walked in.

Describing Processes (1)

We often us the passive when we describe processes, because we are interested in the processes themselves, not in the people performing them. For example:
Coal is mined in the Udi hills.
Diamonds are found in Sierra Leone       

Describing Processes (2)

In most of the examples so far, we have used the present tense of the passive (with is, are). But sometimes we describe processes in the past tense of the passive ( was, were). For example,
The liquid was heated

This is likely to be someone’s report of an experiment carried out in the chemistry lab. The experiment may in fact have been carried out by someone called Seidu. Using the active voice we might say:

Seidu heated the liquid.

But the passive voice is entirely correct when we do not find it necessary to mention Seidu.

Practice

1. Make these two sentences passive, omitting the names of the persons performing the actions:

     Remi recorded the temperature
     Patience measured the plant

2. Complete these two descriptions of experiments using the verbs in brackets

• The liquid was cooled. (filtered/measured/boiled/measured again/then poured away)
• The plants were dug up. (measured/put into a bag/taken to the lab/replanted/watered)

3. Copy out the following paragraph, choosing the correct form from those in brackets:

A stone (was/were) suspended
from a spring balance, and its
weight (was/were) recorded.
Then the stone (was/were)
immersed in water. It (was/were)
then weighed again, and the two
readings (was/were) compared.
It (was/were) found that the
stone weighed more when it was
wet.

Part of Speech: Adjective

Adjectives are words that describe, modify or complement nouns (people, places, things, or animals) or pronouns. They describe the noun by telling us its size, shape, age, colour, etc. Adjectives usually come before the noun or pronoun, or sometimes they can come after it.

Examples:

The black car
The green shirt
A blue hat

Adjectives coming before nouns are attributive adjectives

• Everyone knows a lion has a loud roar.
• My old car is bad.
• Today, we have blue sky.

The words in bold loud, old and blue are adjectives, and they come before the nouns roar, car and sky. The adjectives describe the type of roar, age of the car and colour of the sky.

Adjectives coming after nouns are predicative adjectives

• That piece of meat was quite large.
• One of my tables is round.
• The sky looks very black.

The words in bold large, round and black are adjectives, and they come after the nouns statue, table and sky. Without the adjectives, we wouldn’t know the size of the statue, the shape of the table, and the colour of the sky.

The above adjectives large, round and black are predicative adjectives, and the verbs (was, is, looks) connecting them to their respective subjects (statue, table, sky) are linking verbs.

• The little girl is angry with her father.
• The warm air is thick with dust.
• His big house must be expensive to maintain.

The different kinds of adjectives are discussed in detail in under their respective sections:

Descriptive adjective or adjective of quality

Descriptive adjectives are the most numerous of the different types of adjectives. These adjectives describe nouns that refer to action, state, or quality (careless, toxic, excited, sad, black, white, big, small, long, fat, English, Mediterranean, three-cornered).

• toxic chemicals
• green vegetables
• a round table
• a big cow
• a tall tree
• a cold weather
• a true story
• English language
• Mediterranean country.

An adjective of quantity tells us the number (how many) or amount (how much) of a noun.

• He bought twenty pencils.
• I don’t have much money.
• There is so much wine for the guests.
• This long, thin millipede has many legs. 

Demonstrative adjective

A demonstrative adjective (this, that, these, those) shows the noun it modifies is singular or plural and whether the position of the noun is near or far from the person who is speaking or writing. A demonstrative adjective also points out a fact about the noun.

• This red kite is mine and those three yellow; ones are yours.
• This cute baby is his brother. That cute baby is his sister.
• These two fat cows have tails, but that thin cow doesn’t have a tail.

Possessive adjective

A possessive adjective expresses possession of a noun by someone or something. Possessive adjectives are the same as possessive pronouns. All the possessive adjectives are listed in the following table:

Possessive adjectives/pronouns
Singular	Plural
my	our
your	your
his	their
her	their
its	their

Forms of Adjectives

When we compare two or more nouns, we make use of comparative adjectives and superlative adjectives. We use the following three forms of comparison when we compare two or more nouns.

The absolute form

We use the absolute degree to describe a noun or to compare two equal things or persons.

The comparative form

When comparing two nouns, we use a comparative form of adjective to describe how one person or thing is when compared to another person or thing. In making such a comparison, we have to use the word than to show that one noun is bigger, longer, taller, etc. than the other one.

The superlative form

When comparing three or more nouns, we use a superlative form of adjective. We use the word the when using the superlative adjective to compare.