By American English, Tenses

It is a characteristic of British English, and of American English to a lesser extent, and especially in older forms of the language on both sides of the Atlantic, to substitute shall and should for will and would with a first-person subject.Hence, this substitution in mind, the sentence is...

Hi,there are several different ways to classify vowels (also tense vs lax, for example). What I call vowel length is what is considered in linguistics, I think. It's the difference you hear in General American English between the vowel in GOT and the vowel in GOD, which is the same but in...

Hi FandorinYou seem to be mixing things up.Angliholic's sentence is not an example of the idiomatic "to have got", which means basically the same thing as "to have" or "to possess".In that idiom, it is not possible to change the word 'got' to...

Smelt is an alternative to smelled and is preferable, though not obligatory, in British English. At the end of the day, the sound difference is only between and . The verbs that follow a this pattern of having regular / irregular alternatives with this t/d sound ending are: infinitive ...

He went out already.He has already gone out.Both are OK. British English does not like to use already with past tense, but American English often does.

Yankee wrote:I do see your point, though. I suppose we would tend to be more "willing" to use the present perfect in a sentence such as "My bike's been stolen." -- especially with "Damn!" preceding it. Still, I wouldn't find "Damn! My bike was stolen!" particularly odd in everyday AmE.Thanks...

Hi,good question. If you want the "exact" passive version of "stole", then it's "was stolen". But if you consider that example you gave, then... it's something I've always wanted to know. I think I also asked here, but I got no answer. Let's try again.American active exclamation #1: Damn!...

Thank you Yankee for your detailed answer, but I'm still hopelessly confused about when to use the present perfect and when to use the simple past. You brought up an interesting point about the differences between American English and British English. I wonder if a Brit would find it more natural...