In Articles^x, Subjunctives^x, Nouns^x

I have always heard in conversation - that must be him / her on the phone. Of course we say:He is on the phone now. Grammatically, "that must be him" it is not strictly correct, since the case of a pronoun after "be" is nominative. However, in this case (must be ***), we...

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 GB The...

The first sentence is in subjunctive mood, the article has to agree with the noun: child. The second one is in declarative mood or subjunctive one -- or not? In this case the verb noun-concord applies

Alienvoord wrote: thanks CB. The labels may not be important, but if we are to understand the structure of English, it's important to understand that the verb form used in your first example has a quite different distribution from the forms in your second and third examples. Calling them...

Hello MrM Thank you for the nice info. Reading the article I got curious about how come the construction "had rather X" came into English and studied it through OED. What I learned is as follows; 1) In English there are many similar expressions. They can be all represented by a...

Calif Jim I used past tense in the 'posing' example because I was imagining a press article describing the event. When we say "Manchester United are (or is) posing for photos", we are doing so in the belief that the listener or reader will infer we mean the players - or at least those players...