By Past tenses, Grammar

We've pretty much covered the apple, with all it's various different shades of meaning above. Your mention of "singular pronoun" is misleading, however. Everything would work out exactly the same if it had said "Our" instead of "My". The number of the pronoun is irrelevant here - only the number...

Good Morning, I am an ESL teacher with a question from our grammar lesson today. Working with the simple past tense of regular verbs today, we encounter this guideline in our book: For a one-syllable verb ending in consonant + vowel + consonant, double the final consonant and add -ed:...

You're right to be confused. The grammar book is wrong. You can, for example say "I've been in China for five days, thirteen hours, forty minutes, and twelve seconds." Is that specific enough? To give the book some credit, although specificity isn't the issue, time is. The present perfect...

I am writing a letter, of sorts, and have to use some standard wording based on a specific law. I have a problem with the wording in one. The sentence is....."The blank must have been used and occupied for five or more years having began before December 1975." Everytime I read this I cringe. ...

This book looked promising – it was subtitled A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should Know Better – and in the first few pages I came across a passage referring to that group: What did these people study in high school...

Hello, June. I can point out some improvements for these sentences. 1. In the first sentence, you begin with the past progressive ("was studying"). That implies action that has not yet finished. Then you move on to the past perfect ("had known"). It is not possible for the past perfect to...

According to Leech & Svartvik's "A Communicative Grammar of English", the subjunctive applies to: Congress has voted/decided/decreed/insisted that the present law continue to ooperate. This particular type of subjunctive is called "mandative", and it's common to have only one verb form, the...

What an interesting topic... I have to agree with your opinion, language reflects very much the thinkings or esp. outer circumstances of a people and its culture; you can see that e.g. by how many words exist in one language for the same or at least equal thing: Why else does e.g. English...

English grammar seems to be full of exceptions more than rules. This is a vast topic that could easily fill a book (or two). Where would you like to start? Plurals, past tense, present tense, gerunds, infintives, articles...

It depends... In grammar, there is what is called the subjunctive mood of the verb. You use this mood of the verb when something is contingent, but is not the reality or fact. In this case, you use the plural past tense of the verb. Example: (A) If the president were Al Gore, then America...