Latte: You need to be more careful with punctuation. A typical close test will focus on one subject or theme of instruction, for example: vocabulary building, verb forms, determiners, prepositions, or pronouns. Your exercise is a mixture of all

David at (Email Removed) says in (Email Removed): : In a plural context universal standard English, even in the ... showbiz sloppiness attached a kind of glamour to the habit. Rubbish! "A lot" is entirely singular. So much for UK kulcha

Rich typed thus: First post to this froup (though I have lurked for ... view that would have been held, say, 50 years ago). Mistress. You don't spell Mrs out. David == That's true. But the same pronunciation used as a noun *is* spelled

I'm disagreeing with someone about the hyphen in or not in the following sentences: 'The term "birding" is of American ... commonly used word in Great Britain and Ireland and by non-birders in the United States.' Any

Thus spake Adam Entous: Just how many parts of speech isn't my book telling me about?! Maybe I should upgrade. Yeah, and we don't call them "parts of speech" any longer, they're "word classes". All this nonsense is

Something odd about this: I can't think of any grammar ... determiners. If you had been discussing 'mine, yours, his, hers...' American Heritage Book of Usage , e.g.: : In Standard English, most possessive pronouns have different forms

What are you on? 'My' isn't any kind of case - it's not a (pro)noun. Of course it's a pronoun, at least in part. (It's also a determiner.) That's how the genitive case of a noun or pronoun behaves, in languages which

Something odd about this: I can't think of any grammar that classes the set 'my, your, his, her, our...' as genitive pronouns - they are always adjectives or determiners. If you had been discussing 'mine, yours, his, hers...'

Brief comment: English doesn't have a dative . . . . You know not the ground whereon you tread. Do a usenet Google (the bulk is likely on a.e.u.). Long and often fiery threads. I'm sure there have been, and I see no need to get into them

(snip) I have made the point in the past that in this newsgroup and in alt.english.usage we should be using technical terms as linguists use them, not as the average person uses them. It is my experience that even people with above-average