In Auxiliaries^x, Numbers^x

Alienvoord, I appreciate you're constructive criticism. Allow me to rebute: 1) Comprehensible, yes. But many expressions are comprehensible even without being gramatically sound. The nuances I try to reveal in this post are to help you write better gramatically, not to sound or to write...

It comes from We understand little Note the subject is we . Moving the negative polarity item little to the front forces inversion of we understand . The auxiliary do/does must be inserted first, however. We do understand little Little do we understand. There are a small...

What is the word sucks in " Homework sucks " ? Is it a verb or an adjective? If it is a verb, what does homework suck? This brings up an excellent point, and a wonderful opportunity to discover the beautiful syntactic structure of the English language. The question at hand is " Does an English...

"NASA SP-7084 Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization A Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors" (Mary K. McCaskill Langley Research Center Hampton, Virginia) says " The omission of auxiliary verbs is grammatical unless the subjects change number (Rowland 1962)". In your sentence, "winds"...

Mary Ansell has a chapter on the subjunctive mood at http://www.fortunecity.com/bally/durrus/153/gramch09.html. One of the complications in using the subjunctive is the fact that, besides hypothetical condition clauses, which require the subjunctive, there are factual condition clauses that do...

You can even expand that to " Frequency adverbs come after the auxiliary and before the main verb". always, sometimes, never, usually, rarely, frequently, almost always, hardly ever (But not "once in a while", "from time to time", and 'big phrases' like that! And not typically the ones...

1. You must be pretty dumb if you get a bad mark. This is fine. It’s the first conditional: modal auxiliary verb + if + present simple 2. You must be pretty dumb if you got a bad mark. This would work as the second conditional if you replaced ‘must’ with ‘would’. In such a...

Jack112 wrote: Sorry for my lack of understanding. Could you give me a few more examples as to how to distinguish between them? 1. I have never had more girlfriends than I have now. (Correct) 2. I have never had more girlfriends than I do now. (Is this one correct as well? How...

One reference -- Paul Roberts' Understanding Grammar -- says need has become a sometimes modal auxiliary, while have to, be able to, and be used to are "equivalents of modal auxiliaries." Need was not originally a modal auxiliary, but it has been drawn into the group because of its meaning,...

The Grammar Book ... in English modal auxiliaries (can, may, shall,will, etc.) are distinguished from other auxilairy verbs (be, have, do) as well as from ordinary verbs by their lack of tense ... In English, modals are derived from verbs that DID carry tense and take agreement markers...