Search results for 'tag:Constructions tag:Common errors' matching tags 'Constructions' and 'Common errors'

Re: IS this sentence grammatically correct??

Cool Breeze — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:32:28 GMT

Philip wrote:
common sense "corrects" the intended meaning.
C.B. Thanks for pointing this out. I love the way you exprssed it! I am seldom guilty of this common error myself, but I often don't catch it it others' writing. I guess I have a good deal of common sense.

Hi Philip

As I said, similar clause equivalents are very common in English. Some of them are so common that they have more or less become "idioms" and no one pays any attention to them. This is one of the commonest:

"He is an excellent tennis player with an excellent serve and he seldom makes a double mistake. Having said that, his second serve could be a little faster."

= After his second serve has said that, it could be a little harder. No one says: After saying that, his second serve could be a little faster even though the constructions are usulally interchangeable.

After saying that, he left.
After having said that, he left.
Having said that, he left.
After he had said that, he left.

The trouble is that no one knows where to draw the line. What is acceptable and what isn't? What is the actual subject in countless similar cases? In conversation no insurmountable problems occur. In legal documents and official treaties ambiguities may arise. English is not a good language for such purposes.

CB

Re: How much abstract an abstract noun is?

Clive — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:20:17 GMT

Hi,

"Because of a confusion with that type of sentence, it is a curiously common error to put a comma in the absolute construction"
Should not we use "beacause of confusion..."? Confusion is an abstract noun and can't take 'a' before it.Yes, 'a confusion' is wrong. Your following examples, with 'a', are correct.

Best wishes, Clive

How much abstract an abstract noun is?

elcid — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:47:06 GMT

Hi, I was reading some resource of grammar on internet and came across this sentence.
"Because of a confusion with that type of sentence, it is a curiously common error to put a comma in the absolute construction"
Should not we use "beacause of confusion..."? Confusion is an abstract noun and can't take 'a' before it.

Similarly for sentences like:
"what a beautiful day!" 'A' refers to day right? so it's okay to use it here.
and for "what a nuisance!" Nuisace, can it be counted? If no then why use 'A'?
and for many more sentences similar to "what a mystery!", "what a beauty!" Or is it that my understanding is wrong and we should use "what nuisance!", "what msytery!" , "what beauty!".

Hope to get some comments soon.

Re: Inferior dialects?

Randy_Tam — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 16:55:40 GMT

O, I thought you were, as your quote is in Chinese.

Yes, L(x) is a function indicating whether a language is 'native' or 'foreign' to a person. It is not restricted to Language Acquisition though, as it is widely used in such topics as Language Teaching (see for example, Eric Hawkin's <Awareness of Language>, Psycholinguistics (Fodor's <Language of Thought>... If I remember the name aright), Applied Linguistics (eg. Andrew Radford et al., <Linguistics: an Introduction>.

I am not a specialist in the development of Sino languages though. I am only taking Mandarin as a complusory second language credit course, my L1 being Cantonese Chinese, now considered a 'dialect' for no justifiable reasons, as there has never been a clear distinction drawn between a 'dialect' and a 'language': do the 2 not share the very same traits of a 'language' (a consistent grammar embedded so that an L1 speaker can tell whether an expression is acceptable in his language)? I feel really sorry for my professor, whose views as to a 'language' seem to me simply ignoring the dynamic nature of language. According to her (and the course book), Putonghua was 'designed and standardized (by a committee of linguists... sadly enough), where the lexicon and pronunciations are fabricated according to the dialects spoken around the northern provinces, to be the common language of the entire Chinese population'. Anything that is not in the prescribed list (of words, of the so - called 'syntax', and of pronunciation) is considered 'wrong', the list's constantly changing and being enlarged notwithstanding (direct sources are not available, as I am, as always, but a small potato). The matter on which I want to draw you attention is not this bare matter of fact, but the reason why the list requires constant change.

Given the assumption that the government policy of 'linguistic genocide' (as my French teacher, who used to teach in China and can speak Putonghua even better than most of my classmates, calls that prescription and its making compulsory Putonghua learning in primary schools) is effective, the initial linguistic state of the country ought to be homogeneous, ie. people speaking the 'very same language' at a 'very same standard'... um... to take an analogy from English, if a British calls a person a 'chap', given that policy exists among English speaking countries, you would expect an American, instead of calling a person a 'guy', a 'noob', or a 'pal', to say 'chap' as well. This might well have worked perfectly if 1: people were brainless and non - innovative such that they don't know to invent new expressions or words. 2. if the community (in this case, China) were close against contact with other communities. But neither is true of China (although, from a racist point of view, one may talk of '*** noobs' as he talks of 'frogs'... no puns here, again... just to name an example). As a language is used in daily discourse, deviations related to 1. the phonemic form 2. syntactic constructions 3. pragmatic uses 4. stylistic variations 5. logical interpretations and the like, make language change inevitable. I quote again the examples I came across earlier: 1. the use of 'er' being more flexible these days (as more non - L1 speakers of Putonghua now communicate in that language, whereas the use of 'er' is simply insane in their native language, Cantonese for example) 2. the more flexible use of the '5th tone' (probably brought about by intercourse between Mainlander Chinese and Taiwanese Chinese) 3. words borrowed from other Chinese 'dialects'. All these blur, if not make impossible, the precise definition of the shape of a language. It is for this reason that even though Putonghua was intended as a prescribed language for the entire population, speech variations nevertheless take place (Though asserted as 'wrongs', Chinese linguists have devoted much effort in addressing 'common errors' of a particular group of speaker, a prelude to 'language variations') and eventually prevail over such prescriptions.