In Auxiliaries^x, Adverbs^x

Miriam, The book is by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum. The capital letters in square brackets refer to a list of criteria on the preceding page concerning auxiliary verbs vs. modal auxiliaries. Here's the list: AUXILIARY PROPERTIES Primary verb negation. Subject-auxiliary inversion ...

All of your sentences are correct. The choice of where to position the "maybe" is one of style rather than grammatical necessity. If style is what you'd like to improve on, I would suggest getting rid of the "was...maybe" structure altogether: He saw something that may have been a ghost. It...

The explanation I posted was for the teacher. They must to know themselves what they are going to explain to their students! A teacher is supposed to understand a simple grammatical explanation, then they will find the way to best explain the rule to their own students. I don't know where most of...

"He had not been ill, he might have ccome." I think this sentence should read "IF he had not been ill, he might have come." In your sentence, the conjunction that introduces the conditional clause is missing. The second sentence is fine. When a conditional clause contains one of the auxiliary...

This problem has been lingering in my mind for years. How to analyse it ? have = verb ? ( if have is verb, then ' to go ' is noun phrase and ' now ' is adverb ) ? If this is the case, then ' now' as an adverb can't modify a ' noun phrase ' but modify the have :p . That analysis is a little...