Among my reference books of English is "A Practical English Grammar" by Thomson and Martinet, a must-have for teachers. I have found interesting the parts dealing with the conditional, which has often given me a hard time as I have

I need to make a research on modal verbs.I'm an english teacher from Romania and I need to make my licence on this. Can you help me??? << e-mail address removed - CJ >>

Marking of the genitive, like many things in English, nowadays has two parallel structures, an older, simpler one, and a newer, more flexible one. The newer one here is the use of the modal particle "of". "Modal"? What do you

Just how many parts of speech isn't my book telling me about?! Maybe I should upgrade. In English, modals ("do/does", "did", "can", "could", "will", "would", "shall",

I believe syntacticians would say: they do have subjects, but the subjects are (in such languages) silent elements. There were more than a few syntacticians back in the '80s, when I studied who *really* disliked the notion of ... to say that

If the genitive exists as a case in English, then it's the case assigned to a noun phrase by a possessive "-'s" that follows it. (I.e., in "the queen's museum", "the queen" would be genitive.) You begin

Both versions are technically correct, since "need" can be used as a modal (not "model") verb. As a matter of style, the second version sounds better; I've normally only ever heard the modal version used in the present tense.

Hi ! Will is a modal verb, thus it must be immediately followed by a verb in the INFINITIVE and then you can use an "ING" form. For example: I will BE going to the cinema. NOT: I will going to the cinema. So, don´t forget that after

Maybe the "had better" sentence was originally "We will have had done better to take the freeway." I missed the opening of this thread, but that seems unduly complex. Consider the simple "We had best go." There,

Could someone please help a layman with these two grammar ... the seaside', but how can I explain why it's wrong? First, "might" is a modal auxiliary here and "to" never follows a modal auxiliary. Second, the grammar of