In Modals^x, Auxiliaries^x

Cool Breeze wrote: Grammarian-bot wrote:Congress is debating a bill requiring certain employers to provide workers with unpaid leave so that they can care for sick or newborn children.I have a serious problem with deciding when to use prepositions before verbs and when not to. Any...

Grammarian-bot wrote:Congress is debating a bill requiring certain employers to provide workers with unpaid leave so that they can care for sick or newborn children.I have a serious problem with deciding when to use prepositions before verbs and when not to. Any help/suggestions.Hi GBThe to in...

With further consideration, I can only think that the author of the Wikipedia article on 'Subjunctive Mood' is considering the idea in its widest sense-- as 'any verb or structure that expresses a condition which is doubtful or not factual'. This is interesting for linguistic purposes, but is...

I am indeed trying to help you, and I'll try once more and then be done. The last two examples that you quote fromWikipedia are not in the subjunctive. Subjunctive is a verb form. Both are merely adverbial clauses of purpose (the conjunction is 'so that'), and both must include the auxiliary...

Milky wrote: "I'd like to can swim" is ungrammatical. In English, modal auxiliaries like can and must are disallowed in infinitival clauses." That is a statement that is true of any variety of English with which I am familiar. Prescriptivists and descriptivists are often going to agree that...

Would this be seen as a prescriptivist statement or a descriptivist one? "I'd like to can swim" is ungrammatical. In English, modal auxiliaries like can and must are disallowed in infinitival clauses."

Peaceblinkfriend wrote:Hi,If I hadn't passed my exam, I wouldn't have gone to Cancun. = This is a conditional clause and in this instance, it is being used to talk about something that might have happened in the past, but did not in fact happen. In this sort of conditional clause, you use the...

Modal/Auxiliary + subject-pronoun + not + V ... ? This is a lesser used grammatical pattern. It is used for rhetorical effect. It makes the speaker more like a teacher making a pronouncement rather than an ordinary person having a normal conversation. It may give a haughty or pompous...

Both mean the same. You can put all in either position. It seems to me, though, that it is more common to let it float to the right when the verb is to be or a modal or an auxiliary. They all are smart. CJ

Cool Breeze wrote:1) Leaving taps on and using too much water is very bad for the environment. (Easy, 2 gerunds right?) Right.2) Everyone should be recycling rubbish. Should is a modal auxiliary or a defective auxiliary as these verbs are also called. It is always followed by an infinitive. Be...