By Negations, Verbs

The meaning is understandable for me. Grammar less than perfect, but who cares? <img src="/emoticons/emotion-1.gif" alt="Smile " /> Don't need 'to'. Those infinitives, eh? 'To' is typically used in an infinitive verb pair: 'to go', 'to eat' etc., people like to keep them together: 'to...

Hello Roro I feel it is a bit too difficult to discuss the grammar of our language comparatively with those of Indo-European ones. For example, "I like apples very much" is usually translated into "Boku wa ringo ga totemo suki desu". But strictly speaking "Boku wa ringo ga totemo suki desu" is...

Usages of adverbial 'Much' 1. 'Much' as a verb modifier. 'Very much' and 'much' can modify adjectival prepositional phrases I am very much at home in this area. We were much in need of new ideas. =We were very needful of new ideas. =New ideas are much needed.=We need new ideas...

Hello Your question is related to so called "negative raising problem". It's one of the subjects many linguists studied and still now are studying. When followed by a (that-) clause, verbs like "think" can be used in two ways: . Anyway, when you use NEG-raising verbs like "think", "I don't...

I'm not clear on which rule we are talking about here, Taka, aside from my examples in my previous post-- which show the four meanings of affirmative and affirmative, affirmative or affirmative, negative and negative, negative or negative. Negation in the common verb requires 'or' where...

Hi Paco I hadn't known either the importance of punctuction until I took a grammar class a couple of months ago. here is something that can be useful to remember: when a adverb clause precedes an independant clause ,a comma is used to separate the clauses. When the adverb clause follows, usually...

Hello, Pastel ! Thank you for your reply. I understand you. I am the first to admit that my view is restricted within my narrow ... I dare say ... theoretical point of view ! But what I wanted to say is a little bit different. As you said, what is important is the scope of negation. I agree...

Hi, Roro! I like paco's questions too. I hope this helps but I think khoff's reply is just wonderful. Where's the scope of negation? (1) He has not lived here for five years. ==> He doesn't live here now. He used to live here but left 5 years ago as khoff pointed out. (2) He has not lived...

Hello everyone. This thread is so interesting, enlightning, and above all, intriguing. Please let me butt into here a little bit. Paco wrote: For decades I had misunderstood the sentence "He has not lived here for 5 years". I had never imagined that it means "He has been absent here for 5...

Hello Taka I know you get unpleasant with this, but please allow me to put my two cents on your question. "He learned to smoke" If we compare this with "He learned English", we see "to smoke" here is working as a noun phrase. If we negate the action "smoke", we get a sub-surface collocation...