The rules

Grammar — Tense, Articles, Prepositions, Pronouns, Questions

Fixes §4 Countability, §6 Pronouns, §7 Grammar systems, §8 Sentence structure.

These are systems, not single-word exceptions — the hardest grammar in English because there is no rule to memorize, only probabilities. World English replaces each probabilistic system with one explicit rule.

Rule G1 — A leaner tense/aspect system

Rule. World English keeps three tenses (past, present, future) and one optional aspect (continuous, with -ing). It removes the perfect as a separate form. What the perfect used to encode splits by a single deterministic test: if the situation still holds, use the present tense + a time phrase (I live here for ten years); if it is finished, use the past tense + a time word (I finished already). No wavering between forms — the “still true?” question has one answer, and it picks the tense. The same test extends to a future reference point: the future perfect (“I will have lived here by then”) asks whether the situation still holds at that future point, not now — since it does, the same “still holds” branch applies and the tense collapses to present tense + a time phrase marking the future point (I live here by then), exactly as the present-tense branch does for a present reference point.

Problem it solves. The present perfect is the single most-cited tense difficulty (see §7), and the simple/continuous/perfect choice rarely maps onto a learner’s L1.

Divergence & trade-off. Loses the perfect’s fine “past-with-present-relevance” nuance, recovered with explicit time words (already, since, still). Trade subtlety for a rule a beginner can apply.

Rule G2 — One article rule

Rule. World English has one article: the, used for definite, already-known things. For indefinite things, use no article (singular or plural) or a number/quantifier when count matters. The a/an distinction is removed.

Generics. A generic statement names a whole kind, not one already-known thing, so it takes the zero article — the same “indefinite → no article” case, applied to a class instead of an instance. Standard English spreads generics across three patterns (bare plural, generic the+singular, generic a+singular); World English uses one, the bare plural, already licensed by morphology M4:

One word, every kind of “known.” Linguists distinguish four reasons a thing can count as definite — shared world knowledge, the immediate situation, an earlier mention, or the structure of the phrase itself (see PAIN-POINTS §3, Liu & Gleason 2002) — and standard English learners acquire these at different rates even though the surface word never changes. World English makes that fact explicit: it is always just the, so a learner never has to classify which kind of “known” applies.

Problem it solves. Articles are the single hardest grammatical feature for many learners (see §7); a vs an adds a phonetic sub-rule on top, and standard English spreads one job (marking definiteness) across four unpredictable surface behaviors of the plus a three-way generic split.

Divergence & trade-off. Drops the indefinite article entirely and the a/an sound agreement. Definiteness — the one genuinely useful distinction — is preserved in the, and applies unchanged to plurals (M4) and to newly-countable nouns (G5) with no extra rule. Collapsing the four definiteness “uses” into one the is not a new divergence — they were always the same word — only the acquisition burden of distinguishing them disappears. The one real loss is in generics: standard English’s generic-the-singular (species framing) and generic-a-singular (“any one member”) both fall away in favor of a single bare-plural pattern. Diverges from standard English but removes the largest single grammar burden.

Rule G3 — Regular prepositions for time, place, and verbs

Rule. Prepositions are split into two jobs. Where the choice is arbitrary — fixed by idiom, carrying no meaning a learner could derive — World English removes the guesswork: the time/place choices collapse to one default each, and the verb-selected prepositions are dropped so the verb takes a direct object. Where a preposition marks a real relation (surface, direction, topic), it keeps its meaning.

Time and place — one default each.

Only the arbitrary location choice collapses. The topological prepositions that mark a genuine spatial relation keep their meanings — the cup is on the table (surface contact), under the bridge, behind the door, between the trees. You say in the shop (being located there) but on the table (resting on its surface): the first was arbitrary, the second is real.

Dependent prepositions — dropped. Many verbs demand a preposition for no reason (listen to, wait for, depend on); one L1 preposition maps to several English ones and vice-versa, with no rule to fall back on. When the preposition merely marks the verb’s own object and adds no meaning, World English drops it and the verb becomes directly transitive:

The for test — duration survives, the object drops. for is the one dropped preposition that competes with a for World English keeps: the duration for of S5 (for three minutes). The test: keep for only when it introduces a length of time (answers how long? — for ten years, for a while); in every other case it merely marks the verb’s object (answers wait for what?) and is dropped. One clause can hold both — drop the object, keep the duration:

The duration set is closed and mechanical: for + a number (or a / a few / several) immediately followed by a time unit (second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year…), a bare time-unit plural (for hours), or a fixed span (for a while, for a long time, for now). This is the one dropped-for case the translator decides on sight; every other for after a drop-verb drops.

Keep / drop / replace — the boundary. Every verb+preposition pairing falls into exactly one bucket:

The test that separates drop from replace: drop the preposition only when the verb’s meaning is unchanged without it. If removing it would merge two distinct senses — look for (search) vs look (sight) — the particle carries meaning, so it is a phrasal verb and S2 swaps in a plain verb (seek) instead. So look at (view) drops — the verb means the same thing without at — but look for replaces. This keeps G3 and S2 from claiming the same forms.

Two the test explicitly excludes from the drop list. believe in and pay for fail it, so they are not dropped: believe (accept as true) and believe in (have faith in) are distinct senses — dropping in would merge them — so believe in is a meaning-changing particle routed to replace (S2: trust). And pay already takes a direct object for the recipient (pay the waiter), so pay for (the thing bought) marks a real relation and is kept — dropping it would collide pay the meal with pay the person. They are listed here as the worked cases that show the boundary is a test, not a blanket rule.

Scope of the drop. Transitive-capable verbs only. Adjective- and noun-selected prepositions (good at math, afraid of dogs, reason for it) are not dropped — a predicate adjective cannot take a direct object, so good math is ungrammatical. These are left as collocation residue for S6.

Problem it solves. ~60–70 prepositions used idiomatically with no logic (see §7) — the top source of fossilized error, because the arbitrary pairings are “open-ended, idiom-by-idiom learning with no rule to fall back on.” World English replaces that memorized list with three moves a learner can apply on sight: default the time/place slot, drop the verb’s preposition, or reach for a plain verb.

Divergence & trade-off. Meaningful spatial and relational prepositions (on = surface, under, between, with, directional to) keep their jobs; only the arbitrary choices change. On Monday, on July, and listen music read slightly off to a native ear but are never ambiguous. The drop is lossy on the surface yet reversible: each verb has one canonical preposition, so a reverse translator restores it by lookup (listen → listen to) — the per-verb list lives in vocabulary.md Table A — consistent with the map-back-losslessly goal of morphology M1. The one real risk — two senses collapsing onto one verb — is handled by routing meaning-changing particles to S2 rather than dropping them.

Rule G4 — Regular pronoun case

Rule. Pronouns keep three forms: a subject form, an object form, and a possessive-determiner form built regularly from the object form. The who/whom distinction is removed (always who).

Possessive is the object form + -s (regular, like the plural rule in morphology M4): mes book, hims car, whos turn.

Plural you — you all. English has no distinct plural you, a real gap (dialects fill it with y’all, yous, you guys). World English cannot use yous for the plural, because the table above already assigns yous to the singular possessive (yous book). The plural is the transparent you all (subject and object alike; possessive you alls — the same object-form-+-s pattern as every other pronoun, so it takes no apostrophe, matching G10’s rule that the pronoun possessive-determiner is never written with one), which no other form claims.

Problem it solves. Irregular case grids and the dying who/whom distinction (see §6).

Divergence & trade-off. Keeps the useful subject/object contrast (it marks “who does what”), regularizes the rest. mes, hims are non-standard but transparent.

Rule G5 — All nouns are countable

Rule. Every noun can be counted and pluralized (by morphology M4). The uncountable category is removed.

Problem it solves. The arbitrary, L1-dependent uncountable list (information, advice, furniture) that blocks informations, an advice (see §4).

Examples. some information → informations (when plural is meant); a piece of advice → one advice; furniture → furnitures; much information → many informations; how much furniture → how many furnitures.

Quantifier consequence. Once every noun counts, the count/non-count quantifier split has nothing left to split for the much/many pair, so the determiner much → many everywhere a noun is involved (many informations, not much informations). little/few are the mirror case and are not abolished the same way: per morphology M5, little/few keep less/least (alongside the regular littler/littlest) as a valid, optional World English form — so fewer furnitures and less furnitures are both grammatical; this rule does not force fewer “in all cases.” The learner never again decides whether a noun is “mass” before choosing much vs many; whether to say less or littler for little/few is a separate, already-resolved morphology choice. (This is only the determiner much, the quantifier meaning “a lot of.” The degree adverb much — the intensifier in much gooder, meaning “by a large margin” — is a different word: it modifies a comparative adjective, not a noun, so this much→many swap never touches it and much survives unchanged before any comparative.)

Divergence & trade-off. informations is non-standard English but grammatical in many languages and instantly clear. Removes a noun-by-noun memorization list and its knock-on effects (much vs many, article choice).

Rule G6 — Regular questions and negation (no do-support)

Rule. Form a question with no dummy do and no subject–auxiliary inversion. For a wh- question, the question word moves to the front of the clause; everything after it keeps normal SVO order — there is no inversion of subject and verb the way standard English inverts after the fronted word (who did you call → subject/verb stay in place behind the fronted who). For a yes/no question, nothing moves or is inserted at all; only the punctuation/intonation marks it. In writing, open the question with a leading ? (and capitalize the next word, as the ? opens the sentence) and close it with the usual ?: ?You like it?. In speech, a yes/no question is carried by rising intonation (P7); a wh- question is carried by its fronted wh-word (who, what, where…). Form a negative by placing not immediately before the main verb — in every clause type, including be-clauses, the continuous, the passive, and existential there be clauses: I not be living, It not be red, There not be problem. When a pre-verb adverb is also present, not takes precedence and comes first, immediately before the verb, with the adverb before it: She not often call, never she often not call (see style S7 for the shared adverb/negation slot).

Problem it solves. Do-support inserts a meaningless auxiliary into every question and negative, plus inversion (see §8). Learners already drop it naturally (You like it?).

Divergence & trade-off. Removes do-support and inversion outright and adds no replacement word — so questions are purely subtractive (they drop the meaningless do and put nothing back). A yes/no question is marked by rising intonation in speech and a leading ? in writing; a wh- question by its question word (?Who you seed?). Tag questions (…isn’t it?) collapse to a single invariant tag — right? — eliminating the mirror-the-auxiliary computation. The one cost is that the yes/no question becomes the single construction that rides on pitch (see P7): a deliberate choice to keep questions natural and the language free of coined particles, accepting the flat-intonation-L1 difficulty, mitigated in writing by the leading ?.

Extension — the rest of the negation/question system. Four related constructions follow from the same two moves (marker for questions, not before the verb):

• Modal negation places not in the same slot as everywhere else — right before the content verb — which after a modal means modal + not + verb: I will not go, She can not swim, You must not go.
• Negative imperative is just not + the bare verb: Not go!, Not touch it! — no do-support, consistent with the main negation rule. (An alternative, No go!, was considered and rejected: No is the invariant short answer below, so reusing it as the imperative negator would overload one word; Not go! keeps the not-before-verb rule exceptionless. Recorded as a resolved decision.)
• Short answers are the invariant words Yes / No alone — no do-echo, no auxiliary to mirror (standard Yes, I do / No, she doesn’t both collapse). Add the clause in full if more is wanted: Yes, I like it.
• Existential there is/are collapses to invariant there be (past there beed), since M2 already removes is/are and M3 removes number agreement: There be many persons, There beed a problem.
• Embedded/indirect questions keep the question word — the wh-word or whether for a yes/no embedded question — but use normal declarative word order with no fronting, since there is no inversion to undo in the first place: He asked where he goed, I not know whether it will rain. if is never used for an embedded question — G15 reserves if for conditionals, so an embedded yes/no question always takes whether, never if (He asked whether it rained, not he asked if it rained).

Rule G7 — A reduced modal set, shades by adverb

Rule. World English keeps four modals, one per core meaning, each invariant:

Finer degrees of probability — the work may/might/could/must used to do — are carried by ordinary adverbs before the verb: maybe, probably, certainly. Modals take no past -ed and no -ing; past and hypothetical meaning come from time words (style.md S5) and the conditional rule (G8).

Problem it solves. The modal cluster overlaps on two axes with no rule for which to pick, and carries suppletive pasts (can→could) and defective morphology (see §7).

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. Loses the modal system’s fine gradient of certainty and politeness, recovered with plain adverbs — the same plain-phrasing trade as style.md S3–S4. would is not kept as a modal here; its one surviving job is the hypothetical marker in G8.

Rule G8 — One conditional shape

Rule. Every conditional is if + clause, + result clause, each in its natural tense — no tense-backshift. There are two patterns, by how real the result is:

• Generic/zero conditional — a general truth or habitual result, true whenever the condition holds. Both clauses are present tense; no will/would appears at all (standard zero conditional): If it rain, the ground get wet.
• Predictive/hypothetical conditional — a specific real-or-expected future result, or a hypothetical/unreal one. The result clause marks how real it is with one word:
  • will — a real or expected result (standard first conditional): If it rain, I will go.
  • would — a hypothetical or unreal result (standard second + third conditional): If I have money, I would buy it.

The if-clause is always present tense in both patterns (never backshifted to a past-tense hypothetical the way standard English does for the second conditional); only the result clause changes, and only between the predictive and hypothetical patterns — the generic pattern takes no marker word in either clause.

Past-unreal (“if it had happened”) is carried by a time word (style.md S5), since World English has no perfect (G1).

Problem it solves. The five-way conditional grid graded by backshift + would — and the third conditional’s reliance on had + participle (see §7).

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. Drops backshift, had + participle, and would have + participle — four forms collapse to present tense + will/would. would keeps the one job an English reader already reads as “unreal,” so the shape stays legible; only the certainty/time split is preserved, everything else is dropped.

Rule G9 — Passive voice

Rule. The passive is be + the verb’s -ed form, with an optional by-phrase naming the agent. Because M1 gives every verb one -ed form and M2 gives be one present and one past, the passive needs no separate participle and no auxiliary juggling.

Problem it solves. Standard passives ride on the irregular past participle — the third principal part a learner must memorize per verb (build → built, break → broken) — stacked on the eight-form be. World English removes both: the participle is just the regular -ed, and be is invariant, so the passive is fully derivable.

Divergence & trade-off. The forms (beed builded, be washed) are non-standard but transparent. Style prefers the active (S1): the passive exists for when the agent is unknown or irrelevant, not as a default. Keeping the optional by-phrase preserves the one thing the passive is genuinely for — dropping the agent while keeping the patient as subject.

Rule G10 — Noun possessive

Rule. The noun possessive keeps standard 's (singular) and s' (plural) unchanged. This is one of the few places World English keeps a standard-English form verbatim.

's vs the of-genitive. Use 's (this rule) or the pronoun possessive (G4: mes, hims) for genuine possession — a possessor that has or owns the thing (the dog’s bone, Mary’s car, hims car). Keep of for the non-possessive genitives it already carries: part-whole and relational (the captain of the team, the top of the hill) and fixed superlative frames (the goodest trip of hims life). The two are not interchangeable, so neither is mandated over the other — the same “keep the real distinction, drop only the arbitrary choice” line as S5’s for / since. (Partitive/measure of is separately removed by G5: a piece of advice → one advice.)

Problem it solves. Nothing new to learn — but it must be stated, because M4 makes every plural end in -s, so without the apostrophe dogs (plural), dog’s (singular possessive), and dogs’ (plural possessive) would collapse in writing. The apostrophe is what keeps the three apart on the page.

Divergence & trade-off. None from standard punctuation — deliberately. In speech all three are /dɒgz/, but that ambiguity is exactly what standard English already has, so World English is no worse; context resolves it, and the apostrophe fully disambiguates the written form. (This is the noun possessive; the pronoun possessive is the separate -s form in G4 — mes, hims — which takes no apostrophe.)

Standalone possessive pronouns. World English has no separate standalone possessive form (standard mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs): the same possessive-determiner form in G4 doubles as the standalone possessive pronoun, since the determiner/pronoun split collapses along with everything else in the pronoun table. This book be mes (= this book is mine) is grammatical; likewise That car be hims.

Rule G11 — Relative clauses

Rule. One invariant relativizer, that, introduces every relative clause — for people or things, subject or object. that is never dropped, including in object relative clauses where standard English allows a “zero relative” (the man I saw → the man that I seed, not the man I seed) — the same “always kept, never dropped” rule G14 states for content-clause that, so a learner meets one invariant rule for the word in both jobs. The who / whom / which / whose-relative set is dropped, and so is the restrictive/non-restrictive comma rule (that vs which + comma).

Problem it solves. Standard English splits relativizers by animacy (who vs which), by case (who vs whom), and adds a possessive relative (whose) plus a punctuation-borne restrictive/non-restrictive distinction (that/which + comma) that §8 notes “many natives ignore and few can state.” All of it collapses to one word.

Divergence & trade-off. that for people (the man that I seed) is already everyday spoken English. Possessive relatives use a resumptive pronoun (the man that hims car breaked) instead of whose — slightly longer but fully regular. The lost restrictive/non-restrictive nuance is recovered, when it matters, by rephrasing into two sentences (S1).

Rule G12 — Reflexive pronouns

Rule. A reflexive is the object pronoun + -self, pluralized regularly as -selfs (M4). One formation, no split.

Problem it solves. Standard English builds reflexives two inconsistent ways in one paradigm — myself, yourself (possessive + self) but himself, themselves (object + self), see §6. World English uses the object form throughout, so the rule is one line.

Plural you reflexive — you all self. G4 gives plural you one form, you all, used for subject and object alike — there is no separate 2pl object pronoun to add -self to. So the 2pl reflexive is not built by the same single-word “object + -self” step as the others; it treats you all as the one object form it is and adds self to the whole phrase: you all self (You all should introduce you all self.). This keeps the “object form + self” rule exceptionless once you all is recognized as a single pronoun rather than a sequence needing its own reflexive stem.

Divergence & trade-off. meself and usselfs are non-standard (meself is attested in dialect), but they fall straight out of “object pronoun + self,” and the plural is the plain -selfs rather than the irregular -selves — one pattern, no exceptions. You all self is the one case that reflexivizes a two-word pronoun rather than a single word, recorded here as the deliberate exception the you all system requires.

Rule G13 — Verb complementation

Rule. When an ordinary verb takes another verb as its complement, the complement is always to + base verb. The gerund-vs-infinitive choice (enjoy doing vs want to do) is removed — it is always the to-infinitive. This rule has two closed exceptions, both already ruled on elsewhere and not reopened here:

• Modals (G7: can, must, should, will) take the bare infinitive, never to: You must go (not must to go), She can swim. Modals are not “verbs taking a complement” in the sense this rule covers — they are the fixed functional set G7 already closes.
• Causative/perception verbs — a separate closed class (let, make, help, see, hear + object + verb) — also take the bare infinitive after their object: Let him go, She made me wait, I saw him fall, I heard her sing. This is a fixed lexical pattern (object + bare verb), not an instance of the to-infinitive default.

Outside these two closed classes, every other complement-taking verb uses to + base verb:

Problem it solves. Which complement a verb takes is lexically fixed and unpredictable — enjoy demands the gerund, want the infinitive, begin allows either, and a few verbs (stop, remember) change meaning with the choice (see PAIN-POINTS §3, gerunds vs infinitives). A learner memorizes it verb by verb. One default form erases the list.

Divergence & trade-off. The one real cost is the stop pair: standard English contrasts stop doing (cease) with stop to do (pause in order to). Collapsing both to stop to X makes She stop to smoke ambiguous. World English accepts the ambiguity as rare and resolves it with plain phrasing when it matters — cease for the “quit” sense (She cease to smoke), pause for the “interrupt” sense (She pause to smoke) — the same plain-verb move as S2. Recorded as a known trade-off.

No subjunctive mood. World English has no subjunctive — this is a stated design decision, not an accidental silence. Standard English’s mandative subjunctive (I insist that he go, using the bare base form regardless of subject) and its formulaic subjunctive (if I were you) are both dropped: the indicative is used everywhere, including inside a content clause after a verb like insist/demand/suggest. G14’s ordinary that-clause rule already covers the mandative case with no special form: I insist that he go → I insist that he goes (present indicative, M3’s no-agreement present); if I were you → if I be you (G8’s ordinary conditional, natural tense, no special “were”). One mood, no exceptions.

Rule G14 — Content clauses and reported speech

Rule. A clause serving as the object of a reporting or mental verb (say, think, know, hope) is introduced by that — always kept, never dropped — and stands in its natural tense: no backshift. G1’s one test picks the reported clause’s tense exactly as it does anywhere else — still true → present, finished → past — regardless of the reporting verb’s own tense.

Problem it solves. English backshift (the sequence-of-tenses rule — say → said drags is → was) is grammatical agreement carrying no meaning of its own, and the complementizer that is optionally droppable by a feel few learners share. World English removes both choices: the tense states the real time (per G1), and that is always present.

Divergence & trade-off. Keeping that everywhere is a word longer than the common spoken drop, but it unifies the subordinate-clause marker: the same that introduces relative clauses (G11) and content clauses, so a learner meets one word — “a clause follows” — in both. Dropping backshift means He sayed that it be true reads present because the fact still holds; the reporting verb’s pastness no longer drags the inner tense.

Rule G15 — Subordinating conjunctions

Rule. Adverbial clauses are joined with a closed, one-per-meaning set of subordinators, each used on the standard-English model: one word, natural tense (no backshift, per G1 / G8), and one comma rule — a leading subordinate clause takes a comma, a trailing one takes none.

If it rain, I will go. I not drink it while it be too hot. We leaved because it beed late.

Causal since is dropped in favor of because, which leaves since with only its S5 starting-point sense (since 2015) — removing the one real overlap.

Problem it solves. English offers several subordinators per meaning (because / since / as / for; although / though / even though; while / whilst), split by register and subtle nuance a learner cannot derive. Fixing one default per meaning erases the choice without losing any meaning-bearing distinction — the register-variant synonyms route to S4 / S6.

Divergence & trade-off. The kept words are all everyday standard English used on the standard model — this rule subtracts the synonyms rather than reforming anything, so a page reads normally. The only loss is stylistic variety (always because, never since), accepted under the ease-over-entertainment priority.

Summary table