| His father was Augustine Washington, who had gone to school in England, had tasted seafaring life, and was then managing his growing Virginia estates. His mother was Mary Ball, whom Augustine, a widower, had married early the previous year. The paternal lineage had some distinction; an early forebear was described as "gentleman," Henry VIII later gave the family lands, and its members held various offices. But family fortunes fell with the Puritan revolution in England, and John Washington, grandfather of Augustine, migrated in 1657 to Virginia. The ancestral home at Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, is maintained as a Washington memorial. Little definite information exists on any of the line until Augustine. He was an energetic, ambitious man who acquired much land, built mills, took an interest in opening iron mines, and sent his two oldest sons to England for schooling. By his first wife, Jane Butler, he had four children; by his second, six. |
Ignoring the adjectives and other similar modifiers, we can arrange these nouns (and all common nouns) in FIVE LISTS, based on what we can see, that will help us understand their use in a particular context. Can you explain the criteria for making these five lists? Can you label the lists?:
Can you add the common nouns from this paragraph to the lists?:
|
Childhood and youth. Little is known of George Washington's early childhood, spent largely on the Ferry Farm on the Rappahannock River, opposite Fredericksburg, Virginia. Mason L. Weems's stories of the hatchet and cherry tree and of young Washington's repugnance to fighting are apocryphal efforts to fill a manifest gap. He attended school irregularly from his seventh to his 15th year, first with the local church sexton and later with a schoolmaster named Williams. Some of his schoolboy papers survive. He was fairly well trained in practical mathematics -- gauging, several types of mensuration, and such trigonometry as was useful in surveying. He studied geography, possibly had a little Latin, and certainly read some of The Spectator and other English classics. The copybook in which he transcribed at 14 a set of moral precepts or Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation was carefully preserved. His best training, however, was given him by practical men and outdoor occupations, not by books. He mastered tobacco growing and stock raising, and early in his teees he was sufficiently familiar with surveying to plot the fields about him. Copyright (c) 1996 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Now, complete the following exercise:
After you have looked at the nouns in the first two paragraphs of the article, complete the following exercise as you continue to work through the text: (Here is what your charts from the first two paragraphs should look like.)
| SPECIFIC | GENERIC |
| indefinite |
noncount count, plural count, singular (impossible) |
1. ............ 2. ...........s 3. a ......... |
very common ("all") common, informal (concrete) " " -- complex technical/literary (abstract) (impossible) limited, human groups |
definite |
count, singular or noncount count, plural |
5. the ........ 6. the .......s |