By Conversations, Nouns

Re: Possessive adjectives and pronouns, object pronouns for words such as "person, one, who"

English really needs another pronoun for cases like this! Traditionally, if the gender was unknown, the masculine pronoun would be used. In a grammar book from 50 years ago, your examples would most certainly use "his." Today this would still be considered grammatically correct, but...

Re: "as ... as" expression

Your instinct is right--the phrase refers to "last year's figure" but the word "figure" is understood and so dropped. So grammatically the spelling should be year's. However, it has become common especially in conversationto drop the 's, and that has slipped into...

Re: 'than' in a comparative sentence

It's very common in sentences of this sort to drop everything after the pronoun. So "John is taller than I" is the acceptable wording. In fact, in conversation many, probably most, people would say, "John is taller than me." To those folks using the "correct"...

Re: help me!!

The dialog starts with a greeting formula. Hi, Mark! starts a conversation with a known acquaintance, a friend. How often do you approach a friend and say 'hello' and then ask your friend how long he has lived there? Does that sound like the first question you would ask a friend...

Re: Help proofreading "A Doll's House"

I have underlined some problem areas: The Woman Within the Doll The Baltimore Sun wrote that back in 1879, “A Doll's House” by Henrik Ibsen “shocked and offended people wherever feet” (1031). This might have caused him to become the “half-drowned” kind of man, as he refers...

Re: not / neither / nor

Hi Avangi, If I understood correctly your comments, the "not ... nor" structure makes sense only in two circumstances:(1) unintentional usage: if the speaker changes his/her mind in the middle of the sentence, or (2) intentional usage: a rhetorical device.May I infer that type (1) could...

Re: Everyone does their jobs

Clive -- I agree that "everyone" is often treated as plural in casual conversation, and I might well say "everyone does their best" myself. But technically, shouldn't it be "everyone does his job and everyone does his best," at least in formal writing? I...

Re: some questions

Hi, Here some extracts from conversation (about baseball) I'd like you to help me understand: "...And now that Roger Clemens, who is to pitching in this era what Bonds has been to hitting." - could you explain in terms of grammar why gerund is used? For the same reason that we say 'Pitching is...

Re: When I see him/Tom

When I saw him, Tom was drunk. (I would never say this. It is not right to introduce a pronoun before the noun) Hoa Thai is correct -- if this is the first mention of Tom. However, if the other people in the conversation are already discussing Tom, it would be okay. Something like this: "Did...

Re: conversational activity vs. conversation activity

Why do you need to have a conversation activity? Why can't you just have a conversation? Apart from that, both conversation and conversational will do the job just fine. English is very flexible in this respect and in many cases both a noun and an adjective are correct - at least if you ask...