Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

affirmative                  affirmative 

She

’s lovely, she is.

negative

negative

It’s 

not very good, that one isn’t.

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541 Index for individual terms not in the Glossary

Glossary | 925

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Tail Refers to the word or phrase that occurs at the end of a clause through which

a speaker clarifies, strengthens, extends or emphasises a preceding topic entity.

Tails are a common feature of informal spoken English:

He’s quite a comic that fellow.

They do tend to go cold, don’t they, pasta.

The terms ‘right dislocation’ and ‘post-posed’ are also sometimes used to refer

to tails.

Tense A grammatical category to indicate the relationship between the form of

the verb and the time reference of an event or action. English has two tenses,

present and past:

The players 

practise every day.

(present tense)

They 

had a football match yesterday.

(past tense)

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Historic present tense

Tensed The form of a verb which indicates present or past tense:

He 

loves fish.

They 

worked hard.

I 

was thinking about you.

It is contrasted with non-tensed.

Text A stretch of language, either in speech or in writing, that is semantically and

pragmatically coherent in its real-world context. A text can range from just one

word (e.g. a SLOW sign on the road) to a sequence of utterances or sentences

in a speech, a letter, a novel, etc.