In Articles^x, Subjunctives^x

thanks CB. The labels may not be important, but if we are to understand the structure of English, it's important to understand that the verb form used in your first example has a quite different distribution from the forms in your second and third examples. Calling them "present subjunctive" and...

Hi Believer, to add articles in the sentence you could write The device has 4 active connectors: a power connector, an input-output (I/O) connector………and a GSM antenna connector. This is obviously not as snappy a sentence as the original but it is OK. To make the list consistent, there needs...

Hello MrP. Many thanks for your corrections/suggestions. I know that 11 is forthcoming, but I’ve thought I could make a few remarks about three paragraphs you’ve already reviewed. 4) “He does not hide his ignorance and acknowledges that so far his investigations have not had any positive...

CJ Thank you a lot for the explanation. I down-loaded the two pdfs but I haven't read them yet. As I'm not familiar with linguistic terms, I'm afraid those articles would be quite hard to read through. But reading the article I found and your message, I noticed my first thought about English...

From http://www.sole.leidenuniv.nl/content_docs/ConsoleXII2003pdfs/vlachou-2003.pdf --- More precisely, in (23), the modality is epistemic or, as Condoravdi points out, “the possibility is in view of the epistemic state of the speaker”. In (24), the modality is metaphysical: “we are now located...

Hello CJ Thank you for your compliment. But I'm really too ignorant about modals. It may be because I learned English to read and write engineering articles. In engineering documents they rarely use modals like 'would' or 'might'. By the way I am now reading an article titled as "Moods and...

I read some articles and at long last understood that 'as if' belongs to the same group of sunjunctions as 'I with','it's time' and 'as though' do. Now it seems that it would be rediculous to say 'he behaves as if he *IS* crazy'. Aren't we discussing about something untrue, uncertain or...

Hello MrM Thank you for the nice info. Reading the article I got curious about how come the construction "had rather X" came into English and studied it through OED. What I learned is as follows; 1) In English there are many similar expressions. They can be all represented by a construct: ...

Hello Mr M I found an article as below given in the BBC English site. It says "If S should V" is a very unlikely conditional but The Heritage Grammar site suggests "If S should V" and "If S Vs" are not so different. The Heritage Grammar site suggests "If S should V" and "If S Vs" are not so...

Calif Jim I used past tense in the 'posing' example because I was imagining a press article describing the event. When we say "Manchester United are (or is) posing for photos", we are doing so in the belief that the listener or reader will infer we mean the players - or at least those players...