Timeline for "I think she is not right" - is this sentence correct?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 12, 2015 at 14:32 | vote | accept | Diana Amza | ||
| Jan 4, 2015 at 16:07 | answer | added | Neil Coffey | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 4, 2015 at 14:37 | comment | added | DoSantos | Substitute 'right' with 'there' : We have : I think she's not there. Cf : she 's not there, I think. Quite confusing | |
| Dec 7, 2014 at 22:20 | comment | added | Neeku | I remember this grammar rule from Longman's Total English series where it's clarified that for such sentences, you should always make the first part negative, i.e. "I don't think she's right." | |
| Dec 7, 2014 at 18:36 | review | Close votes | |||
| Dec 9, 2014 at 14:20 | |||||
| Dec 7, 2014 at 16:03 | comment | added | John Lawler | There's two kinds of "legally" correct -- there's the phony kind of law, like don't split infinitives and don't say that because you sound uneducated -- that's all bullshit and you can ignore it. But there are real grammar rules that everybody follows, that yield very strange sentences when they are violated. Grammarians have a term for the funny feeling a native speaker gets when they encounter someone saying, e.g, *She took over Jim lunch (instead of She took lunch over to Jim). They call it Ungrammaticality; the rules for sorting out objects and particles were not followed correctly. | |
| Dec 7, 2014 at 15:30 | comment | added | Hot Licks | There's a lot of difference between an English sentence being "legally" correct and it being natural-sounding. I suspect the hangup here is with "think", in that it's "unnatural" to put a negating adverb ("not") to the right of at least that verb. (I haven't thought through the general case of other verbs.) "Natural" is to either use "don't" on the left side or use the inverse of the adjective ("wrong" vs "right") on the right. (I'm sure the lawyers around can come up with a more rigorous rule.) | |
| Dec 7, 2014 at 15:20 | comment | added | Diana Amza | Thanks for the reply! "Right" can be replaced by anything, for example "Beautiful". In that case, would "I think she's not beautiful" sound a bit odd too? I agree that it doesn't sound great but I cannot find a reason why it would be incorrect. | |
| Dec 7, 2014 at 15:12 | comment | added | Hot Licks | There are hundreds of ways to say that, depending on precisely what you mean by "right". If someone tells you that "X said Y" it's perfectly fine to respond "I don't think she's right" or "I think she's wrong". "I think she's not right" is a bit contorted. Of course, if you think she's not in her right mind, that's an entirely different tap dance. | |
| Dec 7, 2014 at 15:03 | review | First posts | |||
| Dec 7, 2014 at 22:20 | |||||
| Dec 7, 2014 at 14:59 | history | asked | Diana Amza | CC BY-SA 3.0 |