In Inflections^x

Su's post: I always wonder some thing in English grammar. For instance, the sentence: I drive him. 'I' is the subject. 'Him' is the object. Yet their position have told us this too. Is that means the English grammar is sort of double expressing? For if the sentences of: I him drive. drive I...

1) Derivation often changes the word's lexical category, but not always: great (adjective) => great+ly => greatly (adverb) dog (noun) => dog + house => doghouse (noun) 2) Inflection doesn't change the word's lexical category. It adds meaning: number, person, tense: Number: dog (singular...

I won't comment on your post, Su, but I'd like to add a few other remarks. When I was a kid, I did benefit from grammar lessons. After all, English has relatively few inflections and rely mainly on word order, so sentence structure has to be a sustantial part of the basic curriculum. But by...

Hi Yoshi, He got all A's. The word A's functions as a plural noun . If we add the noun "grades", the result is ungrammatical: *He got all A's grades . (ungrammatical) There are two problems with the above sentence: 1) if A's is a noun, then there should be a conjunction joining...

There is ... no basis at all for including dative among the inflectional categories of the English noun. And there is likewise no basis for including nominative or accusative (or objective) among the inflectional categories of the English noun. English nouns have no inflections whatever...

Hi MrP Yeah I agree to your view that the double objects construction had been established when case inflection was still retained English. I guess you are rather special in linguistic sense. I'm a little doubtful of common English speakers in the sense of differentiating objects into dative...

In English the forms for the indicative and those for the subjunctive are identical in the present. Exception 1: The subjunctive of "to be" in the present is "be" regardless of the subject. Exception 2: The third person singular drops the "s" inflection of the indicative to form the...

Hello MrP Thanks for the reply. I am lucky I get an confirmation directly from a native speaker to that I had better not say "I'm a Japanese", though I feel somewhat like unhappiness in your way of discriminating the suffices "-an" and "-ese". By the way I feel the word "Japaneses" is much...

It seems to me that I have heard this called an "absolute superlative" (as opposed to a "relative superlative", in which there is truly a comparison). Other authors insist that there is no absolute superlative in English because English has no special grammatical inflection to distinguish it from...

Yes, certainly, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can help lessen a strong New York or southern dialect. It is not necessarily more difficult than a foreign accent to change - once you learn the specific characteristics of the dialect and how it differs from the standard American English...