By Constructions, Definite articles

Hello Taka We can say: 1. 'He's no friend of mine.' 2. 'That friend of yours is very strange.' 3. 'He's a friend of theirs.' 4. 'Friends of ours are coming over tonight.' 5. 'Luckily, some friends of his were passing at the time.' But I can't think of an example where the definite article...

Hello Ed Fair enough. Perhaps: "I have reviewed the actual progress in the work against your submitted project schedule, and have noticed that construction is significantly behind schedule. As of November 21, the work was 18% complete, while the progress schedule requires 25% completion by...

Hello, runner I don't know if this will be very easy to understand. It will depend, perhaps, on how familiar you are with syntactic analisis. "a person or object" is a noun phrase which has two heads: person and object. Both heads appear in coordination (linked by the conjunction "or"). The...

Dave, First of all, and even when everyone is surely aware of this, I must insist that even when I believe my knowledge of the English grammar is good, I'm not a grammarian or a linguist. It would be completely absurd for me to try and analyse a language that is not even my own in depth when I...

The full grammatical explanation is that an adjective modified by the intensifiers 'too', 'so' or 'enough' can be separated from its complementation if the adjective is placed before the indefinite article of the noun phrase. Let's take "It was so hot a day that we went out." Adjective:...

Here's the long version: I've thought about this question a lot, and I think now I've arrived at a conclusion. The meanings of the sentences don't change too much without the 'a +noun'. They're also still grammatically correct: "It was so hot that we went out" still works as a sentence. ...