New answers tagged grammar
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Can V3 form of any verb be used as an adjective to express a current state? If not, what kinds of verbs can be used that way?
Normally, because intransitive verbs cannot have direct objects, they cannot be passivized and so what you call the 3rd form of the verb, the past participle, cannot be used as an adjective. For ...
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Nonrestrictive attributive clauses, comma and meaning of the sentence
I am in complete sympathy with your problem. It doesn't make much sense as stated. Given the context of the sentence I suspect a typo. I believe that "institution, creativity and perseverance &...
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Temporal deictic expressions and the latest reference point
(1) 'Does “in an hour” (or similar statements) always rely on the last defined reference point?'
No:
In the war, when everyone had to do his or her duty, he quickly enlisted.
Here, the anchor '[In] ...
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6
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Accepted
"All" followed by "of + pronoun"?
These are implicit partitives where a quantity has been established and now all with understood of... establishes which part of that quantity is meant.
However, we seldom have all with an implicit ...
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What is the right form? Causative
In a comment, John Lawler wrote:
The get Passive is not a causative; it's normally inchoative. It's just an alternative passive construction that uses inchoative get instead of stative be as its ...
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The way that/the way in which
I
It's not what you say, it's the way that you say it.
The use of the pronoun "that" can only be considered, in this sentence, to be made in the objective case; "that" as subject ...
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2
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The way that/the way in which
in which (phrase)
“In which” (= that … in) is a phrase (comprising the preposition “in”
plus relative pronoun “which”) to provide the functionality of a relative pronoun.
[Robert C Lee; Grammarly]
...
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Prepositions for the word "placement" or "clinical placement"
It depends what nuance you wish to place on it
I went to the cardiac ward in my first clinical placement.
In = during [the time of]; within
I went to the cardiac ward for my first clinical ...
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The article in "a salt on its tail"
I don't disagree with Greybeard's etymology or semantic analysis, but the following may help explain the grammar.
A normal reading of 'have an X on their tails' would involve the verb have taking a ...
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Why use "long periods" instead of "a long period"?
The author uses the plural because there are multiple occasions when groundwater emerges at the surface after being underground for a period of time. Some of these periods have been long ones.
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Why use "long periods" instead of "a long period"?
There's no good reason. "A long period" is probably better and certainly more precise, but "long periods" is also acceptable and idiomatic.
It does perhaps emphasize the extreme ...
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Two verb in that/relative clause
a statement (that you strongly believe) is true
is not a definition of a noun. It's a sentence that describes a state of affairs. Word definitions are not generally full sentences, they're phrases ...
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Term for (and history) repeating main verb at the end of a sentence?
The problem is that this is less a feature of English writing than of speech and song. One example of the latter springs to mind: the song "I'm [or "it's"] Henry the eighth I am I am, ...
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How can you 'test' for grammatical properties in A Student's Introduction to English Grammar?
Can I just put the word in question in any sentence to see if it has any other properties?
Yes, at least provided it has the same sense, and you need to do that for exactly the reasons you specify.
...
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1
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Accepted
The article in "a salt on its tail"
Palmer himself described them best when he said that they had "a curiousness in their beauty – a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them".
This is correct. The ...
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