A mouthful of English

In English, we often use an apostrophe followed by an s to express possession : instead of the baby of Rosemary , we say Rosemary’s baby . That means Rosemary has a baby. We normally use this structure with people and animals, to indicate that they have something – the baby’s name, the girl’s name, the cat’s name . However, we say ‘ the name of the girl who had the baby ’ – because ‘ the girl who had the baby’ is a long phrase. Sometimes we find one ’s after another: The baby’s mother’s name is Rosemary .     ( → Here the baby has a mother, and the mother has a name.) We must be careful with the spelling. When a noun is plural and ends with an -s , we only write an apostrophe: my parents’ house . So I can talk about my friend’s house (if the house belongs to one friend), or my friends’ house (if it belongs to more than one friend). When a noun is plural but doesn’t end with an –s , we write the apostrophe followed by an s : the children’s bedroom, wo

That is one of the most frequent words in English. In fact, we can say it is several words. It’s a pronoun in ‘ that’s my cat ’, a determiner in ‘ that cat is mine ’, and an adverb in ‘ English isn’t that difficult .’ It can also be used as a conjunction to join sentences, as in ‘ I think that English is very easy .’ When that is a conjunction, it is often left out in informal speech – mostly after verbs like say , know , or think : I think (that) English is easy . She said (that) she was happy . You know (that) I’m right . In ‘ This is the music that I love ,’ that is a relative pronoun – and it can be omitted too:     This is the music I love . We can’t omit it in ‘ She’s the girl that works here ,’ because it’s the subject of ‘works’ (‘that’ = ‘the girl’ → the girl works here.) But we often leave relative pronouns out when they are the objects of verbs: The house (that) I like is very expensive .     (‘that’ = ‘the house’ → I like the house .) The story