16
votes
Accepted
The grammaticality and function of "people ages 20 to 30" (as opposed to "people aged 20 to 30")
[1] a. It is the third-leading cause of death for young people ages 15 to 24.
b. While parents are off shopping, children ages 3 to 8 can play in the
glass-enclosed child-care ...
- 12.6k
14
votes
What is the grammatical term for “‑ed” words like these?
They are called the Past Participle.
They can either be formed by adding the suffix ed
or be an irregular such as: eat-> eaten -> fight -> fought (not to be confused with The Past Simple which is ...
- 1,387
11
votes
"the girl with the red dress on" — What licenses the preposition "on"? What does it function as?
On here is an adverb (or adverb particle1 as Cambridge calls it):
ON: adverbin or into a position of being attached to or covering a surface
especially : in or into the condition of being worn
put ...
- 35.7k
7
votes
In "experience teaching this material over a number of years convinced me that", is "experience" a noun adjunct?
"...but experience, (while) teaching this over a number of years, convinced me..."
"Teaching" is merely part of a subordinate adjectival clause, qualifying "experience".
The "while" has been ...
- 64.9k
7
votes
What is the function of "as" here in the sentence and is there a lack of preposition before "the unpardonable sin"?
Evidently Chesterton had heard some people attack Christianity by describing it as a thing of inhuman gloom. The bolded words could be replaced with because they considered it or similar.
Chesterton ...
- 26.6k
6
votes
The grammaticality and function of "people ages 20 to 30" (as opposed to "people aged 20 to 30")
To supplement Linguisticturn's excellent answer, there is a little bit to be said about a very marked US/UK split on the idiomaticity and grammaticality of posthead NP modifiers using the noun age.
...
- 48.1k
6
votes
What are the roles of ‘can’, ‘do’, and ‘is’ in ‘All a man can do is smile back’?
The man could have been smiling
All a man can do is smile
The Original Poster asks about the grammatical roles of can, do and is in example (2). For simplicity, I have extracted the clause we are ...
- 48.1k
5
votes
Accepted
What’s the grammatical role of "for you" in "I am waiting for you"?
The grammatical role of for you in
I am waiting for you.
is that it is an optional argument to the verb. It is not an adjunct. It just happens to be a prepositional argument, not a core argument ...
- 136k
5
votes
Accepted
In "experience teaching this material over a number of years convinced me that", is "experience" a noun adjunct?
My original purpose was to write an undergraduate text on digital communication, but experience teaching this material over a number of years convinced me that I could not write an honest exposition ...
- 83.8k
5
votes
Accepted
What is the function of "Monday?"
Neither. It is a noun, but it is not being used as a direct object, but as a time adjunct. This is a function that can be carried out by phrases headed by words belonging to various parts of speech (...
- 83.8k
4
votes
English Poetry Question
If “gerund” means “using a non-finite verb clause where the grammar requires a noun phrase”, then sure, since the verb phrase headed by talking is being used as an object. So we know that as a ...
- 136k
4
votes
An article before gerunds
Why can't I say "He was expelled for the killing of the birds?"
You actually can say that. It isn't grammatically incorrect and it makes perfect sense. It does make it somewhat less ...
- 19.3k
4
votes
Adjectives acting in the capacity of adverbs? Or just accumulative adjectives?
At the risk of committing an opinion, I should suggest this. Apart from certain adjectives which are recognised as also having a standard adverbial use (‘fast’, for example), many adjectives are used ...
- 11.3k
4
votes
Accepted
What grammatical roles do infinitives and participles assume when used predicatively?
The question wouldn't arise if there weren't a false dichotomy between some uses of auxiliary verbs and others. Be is not a "linking verb". That's a term for grade school students. Be is an ...
- 108k
4
votes
Noun + Gerund Structure Differences
The main difficulty results directly from your terminology, which as far as I can tell, is an unusual* one that is leading to paradoxes and misunderstanding. You appear to be using the term “gerund” ...
- 136k
4
votes
"Doctors often work very long hours": intransitive verb followed by a noun?
Measure phrases like two miles or 40 hours are not direct objects, normally
though there are verbs that can take measure objects,
especially when they stand for quantified noun phrases:
He loaded ...
- 108k
4
votes
What are the grammatical name and function of ‘five months later’?
In a comment, BillJ wrote:
It's an adverb phrase functioning as a temporal adjunct. The head word is the adverb "later", which is modified by the noun phrase "five months".
4
votes
Present participle result
TLDR: For whatever reason, questions regarding the possible syntactic structures involving ‑ing phrases / clauses are among the most common questions we get here, especially but hardly exclusively ...
- 136k
4
votes
Accepted
What is the function of "their way" in "they went their way"?
And they that were sent went their way, and found even as he had said
unto them.
I don't see any reason why the NP "their way" should not be considered direct object of "went".
- 13.4k
4
votes
"the girl with the red dress on" — What licenses the preposition "on"? What does it function as?
I would parse this sentence as follows:
The girl with the red dress on
In this context, the word "with" is equivalent to "who has". Both are specifiers which say the same thing ...
- 293
4
votes
Is "arriving " a gerund?
I would identify this as present progressive case, which consists of a form of "to be" + "-ing". What makes "arriving" look like a gerund in this context is that "...
- 41
4
votes
A question about syntactic function of the clause
I recommend not trying to make too much of this exotic, seldom heard construction. You can analyse it like you do a reason+why or place+where or time+when clauses, but it is not standard English today ...
- 136k
3
votes
Accepted
What's the FUNCTIONAL difference between a supplement and an adjunct/modifier?
The whole problem boils down to one thing. Like all traditional grammarians and all laypeople, you have to stop trying to base syntactic decisions on vague intuitions about what modifies what in a ...
- 13.4k
3
votes
Accepted
Does a verbal noun turn back into a verb when modified by an adverb?
In your second example, the object of the verb like is the
gerund clause singing loudly, which serves as the NP object of the
verb here. The head of that
clause is the verb singing as modified ...
- 136k
3
votes
What is the correct part of speech when someone calls you by your name?
The part of speech for people's names is:
a proper noun or proper name
They act grammatically mostly like other nouns (common nouns) but with some minor differences.
- 72k
3
votes
Accepted
Does 'whilst' contain an invisible verb within it?
It's not a verb hiding beneath the -st ending, but a adverbial genitive s with a periphrastic t glued on for ease of pronunciation, both added to while. The same is the case for amongst, amidst, midst,...
- 28.2k
3
votes
What is a gerund? A noun or a verb? 'His smoking upset me’
Since you mentioned Huddleston and Pullum, this answer will be based on the terminology that they use. Huddleston and Pullum use the term "gerund-participle" instead of "gerund" because they reject ...
- 83.8k
3
votes
What is the grammatical term for “‑ed” words like these?
The -ed in all of your examples is a past-participle suffix. A past participle is not a derived form: rather, it is an inflected form of a verb (assuming you accept the distinction between derivation ...
- 83.8k
3
votes
In "experience teaching this material over a number of years convinced me that", is "experience" a noun adjunct?
Experience is just a noun here. Insert my in front of it to get a better read:
. . . but my experience teaching this material convinced me . . .
Teaching this material over a number of years is a ...
- 18.5k
3
votes
What are adjective phrases exactly?
The confusion stems from calling anything that modifies a noun an adjective, and the only slightly better solution of saying 'adjectival' instead of 'modifier in a noun phrase'.
The Oxford Dictionary ...
- 10.4k
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