Search results for 'tag:Dates tag:Noun phrases' matching tags 'Dates' and 'Noun phrases'

Re: what could come after a preposition?

CalifJim — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:27:38 GMT

The only thing that can come after a preposition to form a prepositional phrase is a noun phrase, usually a noun accompanied by its preceding determiner and perhaps an adjective. A relative clause may be added. The noun itself may be a gerund.

If the element after the candidate for a preposition looks like it's not a noun, then either of these holds:

a. The preposition candidate is not a preposition, but perhaps an adverb or conjunction.
b. The structure after the preposition candidate actually is a noun phrase.

Both of your examples are in the category labeled b.

In your first example bad should be viewed as an adjective used as a noun, 'promoted' to a noun because of the elision of situation or its equivalent, one.

The situation can be seen as a bad situation.
The situation can be seen as a bad one.

In your second example, bad and good are simply abstract uncountable nouns meaning that which is bad and that which is good, respectively.

CJ

Re: Verbs...

Grammar Geek — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 21:02:38 GMT

Bob is one of those people who LIKE to watch football.

Marxism is one of those theories that ARE seen as left-wing.

Nora is one of the candidates who ARE worthy of my vote'

These are all the same pattern. The blue is the main subject/main verb. The purple is just a portion of the noun phrase that has an embedded noun and verb within them. The purple embedded noun and verb agree with each other.

Read through what Doll wrote again, and let us know which part seems to contradict this pattern above.

Re: Possible duplicate...

Grammar Geek — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:21:18 GMT

Nora IS - this is the main subject and verb of the sentence.

"the candidates who are worthy of my vote" - this noun phrase all works together, but the individual nouns and verbs within this phrase must agree with each other, not with the main subject of the sentence.

Re: Basic syntax of a sentance

CalifJim — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 06:25:32 GMT

It might be instructive for you to try this on your own before checking what others have already done, but be aware that you are repeating work that began quite a long time ago. One of the first attempts that I'm aware of was Terry Winograd's Language as a Cognitive Process, Volume 1, Syntax (1983), although he quotes parsing algorithms that date back to 1972 or earlier. Appendix D of that work contains the network descriptions for a variety of sentence segments, such as noun phrase and prepositional phrase, but the diagram you'd probably be most interested in is the S network (sentence network) on page 596. It has thirty different substructures which can be detected within a pattern containing ten nodes. The book is very useful if you want to know about a variety of techniques for parsing natural language: backtracking stacks, parser design, how to handle ambiguity, top-down vs. bottom-up parallel recognition, and augmented transition networks. Since the book is more than 20 years old, I'm sure there are even better ones you can find. I think much of the basic work on this has already been done by now, and you can probably find what is currently considered the best algorithm for this -- except for those algorithms are proprietary.

Good luck!

CJ

Re: Inversion

Mister Micawber — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 04:30:28 GMT

Well, Fowler is a little out of date now, and I imagine that many of his suggested inversions would be considered overprecious, but:

1-- B is not a correct correction of A. Fowler is saying that A should read 'To these causes may be attributed our disasters'-- thus placing the subject, disasters, at the absolute end. If we use the longer subject, then this would be OK: To these causes may every one of the disasters that have come upon us be attributed.

2-- I don't even understand his rationale on this one, since I don't see a compound verb (e.g. run and jump)-- all I see is a verb phrase (must...go -- to find is just a verb complement). However, what he wants to say (I think) is that in D, must we go to find is wrong, and equally wrong would be must lie. He wants to see a longer, more emphatic noun phrase as subject:

Much deeper down than the history of the human race must our university researchers go to find the beginnings of these connections.
.

Re: prospective/expected/anticipated

Grammar Geek — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:41:17 GMT

I find expected and anticipated more closely linked.

According to www.m-w.com: EXPECT implies a high degree of certainty and usually involves the idea of preparing or envisioning

The site lists expected as a synonym for prospective, but prospective is far less certain than expected. Also, you can use this as "a prospective employee" meaning someone who may or may not be a good choice for a job candidate.

Anticipate also lists expected as a synomym, defining anticipate as "to look forward to as certain." (But to me it carries a sense of something you WANT to have happen, perhaps because it is paired so often with "eagerly anticipated" -- you can also construct a sentence in which someone anticipates something that is NOT pleasant, so it is probably just a personal bias.)

If you are waiting for a friend to arrive from out of town, you could expect him to arrive at noon, based on how far he has to travel. But overall, you eagerly anticipate his visit. And if you are introducing him to your sister, he is now a prospective brother-in-law.

As verbs:

You can say "I anticipate his arrival" - you need a noun phrase after the verb anticipate.

Or "I expect him to arrive shortly" "I expect that cake to be delicious"- in this case, you have more of an action.

You cannot say "I prospect" (unless you are a miner looking for gold).

Re: Correct Grammar

Guest — Sat, 15 May 2004 12:48:10 GMT

Interesting question.

The American HeritageÂ® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (referenced at dictionary.com) has this to say :

Some speakers of vernacular English varieties, particularly in isolated or mountainous regions of the southern United States, use phrases such as of a night or of an evening in place of Standard English at night or in the evening, as in We'd go hunting of an evening. This of construction is used only when referring to a repeated actionwhere Standard English uses nights, evenings, and the like, as in We'd go hunting nights. It is not used for single actions, as in She returned at night. Â·Interestingly, these of and -s constructions are related. This -s construction, which dates back to the Old English period (c. 449-1100), does not signify a plurality but is similar to the so-called genitive suffix -s, which often indicates possession, as in the king's throne. Just as this example can also be phrased as the throne of the king, nights can be reformulated as of a night. This reformulation has been possible since the Middle English period (c. 1100-1500). Sometimes the original -s ending remains in the of construction, as in We'd walk to the store of evenings, but usually it is omitted. Using of with adverbial time phrases has not always been confined to vernacular speech, as is evidenced by its occurrence in sources from the Wycliffite Bible (1382) to Theodore Dreiser's 1911 novel Jennie Gerhardt: âThere was a place out in one corner of the veranda where he liked to sit of a spring or summer evening.â Â·Using such of constructions reflects a long-standing tendency for English speakers to eliminate the case endings that were once attached to nouns to indicate their role as subject, object, or possessor. Nowadays, word order and the use of prepositional phrases usually determine a noun or noun phrase's role. Despite the trend to replace genitive -s with of phrases, marking adverbial phrases of time with of is fading out of American vernacular usage, probably because one can form these phrases without -s, as in at night. See note at Smith Island.

Given this explanation, I think the answer is 'no', because it is only used to refer to a repeated action : "did you arrive of a saturday or a sunday" would be correct (in the sense above) only if you and the speaker were discussing your regular arrival at some place, which happened in the past.

Re: Maj - First question (Other than that)

wumanfu — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 14:29:41 GMT

Hi, this is my first post to the group. Iâve just pasted information from Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage. To be quite frank, I donât really understand these definitions fully but I hope the information is useful to you. So, regarding the words
1 Than
2 that
1 Than is normally used to introduce the second element in a comparison, and acts either as a conjunction (He is older than I am) or as a preposition (He
is older than me). In uses such as He is older than I, than is normally regarded as a conjunction with the verb following I understood, but in spoken English
at least the more usual choice is the type He is older than me.
2 that is a word with many roles, and plays a major part in English sentence structure. The following are its main grammatical functions:

DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUN: That was what I meant

DEMONSTRATIVE ADJECTIVE: Why did you take that picture of me?

DEMONSTRATIVE ADVERB: I was that angry / It didn't hurt that much

RELATIVE PRONOUN: It was not the drug that had done it

CONJUNCTION: He had assumed that we would want to see him (1) As a demonstrative pronoun and adjective, that normally refers to something already mentioned
or known: (pronoun) She had not meant it so, but it could have been read like that / How the hell did you manage that? / The witnesses, if they could be
called that, continued to repeat that they knew nothing / (adjective) If I were you, I would keep an eye on that young man / It wasn't a nature reserve,
that Ark of yours. There are also a number of familiar idiomatic or formulaic uses: Something worth a lot of money, that's for sure / She had a small,
pretty face, I'll give you that / She cleared her throat to speak but left it at that / I just wanted to see her, that's all. (2) Its use as a demonstrative
adverb equivalent to so or very (or so very) dates from the 15c and has been slipping in and out of standard usage ever since. In current English it is
regarded as informal in both positive and negative contexts:

âShut up,â says Claudia â¦ âIt's not that funnyââDavid Lodge, 1988 / You and your brother, you're not really that alike, are you?âEncounter, 1989. In other
contexts, however, it verges on the formal or at least neutral:

The questioning attitude that comes naturally at student age is not that easily abolishedâListener, 1987. (3) As a relative pronoun, that becomes an alternative
to which (and occasionally who). Although they are often interchangeable, there are some uses that are peculiar to each: (a) When that is used it normally
introduces a so-called ârestrictiveâ clause, which defines or gives essential (rather than additional) information about the noun or noun phrase that comes
before: the pen that my father bought for me / the pen that is over on the table/ (in each case the that-clause defines which pen is meant). (See further
at
RELATIVE CLAUSES).
In these cases the that-clause normally follows on without a comma. Which can also be used in these examples, but in conversational English that is more
usual, and in some cases it is possible to omit the relative pronoun altogether and say the pen my father bought for me. That can also replace who (or
whom), especially when the reference is non-specific, as in The person that I saw was definitely a woman, and when there are two antecedents, one inanimate
and the other human: It was the drug and not her brother that had upset her. (b) That is also more idiomatic than which in a number of cases: (1) when
which already occurs earlier in the sentence in another role (Which is the house that you bought?), (2) after indefinite pronouns such as anything, everything,
nothing, and something (There is something that I forgot to mention), and (3) after a construction with the impersonal it (It is the new one that we want).
When that is the object of the verb in its clause, it is regularly omitted, especially in speech (There is something I forgot to mention). (c) Which, not
that, has to be used in so-called non-restrictive clauses which give additional rather than essential information: A new edition of the book, which has
taken ten years to write, will be published this week. Which is also used when a preposition precedes it (Is this the book to which you are referring?);
in a corresponding construction with that, the preposition has to come at the end (Is this the book that you are referring to? or Is this the book you
are referring to?). (4) That is used as a conjunction to introduce a subordinate clause, principally after verbs of saying, feeling, believing, knowing,
learning, etc.: The President admitted that he had lied / We would hate to think that they were corrupting you / I understand that you wanted to see me.
A that-clause of this type can also occur after the impersonal it: It was natural that they should think so. Normally the conjunction that can be omitted,
especially in speech: I understand you wanted to see me / It was natural they should think so. In inverted constructions, however, in which the that-clause
comes before the main clause, that is obligatory: That they are guilty is assumed by everybody.

Notes from Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage.