Search results for 'tag:Direct objects tag:Tenses' matching tags 'Direct objects' and 'Tenses'

Re: to be + past tense

Avangi — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:15:33 GMT

Hi, Q75. Welcome to the English Forums!

The basic principle parts of the verb are the infinitive (to train), the present participle (training) and the past participle (trained). These basic parts are used in forming the various tenses, together with help from "auxilliary verbs," in this case "to be."

You might say it's coincidental that "trained" is the past tense and also part of the passive voice.

Yes, it does have something to do with the verb being transitive. (Actually, "to train" may be either transitive or intransitive. "My wife trained me very well." "I went to college and trained to become a teacher.") If the active verb does not take a direct object, it can't be converted to passive voice. The verb "to sleep" is only intransitive. You can't "sleep someone." By the same token, you can't "be slept by someone." That is, it doesn't work in the passive unless it's a transitive verb.

The passive forms use the verb "to be" plus the past participle of the main verb. "To be" changes with the persons and tenses, but the past participle stays the same. (I am trained; they are trained; I was trained; they were trained; I will be trained; they will be trained.)

Best wishes, - A.

Re: The Continuous tense

Tanit — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:41:53 GMT

"Have you ever had the feeling that you're being followed?"

Hi again

Anonymous
Ah ok, so is that entire sentence classed as Present Perfect Continuous, or are the clauses treated separately?

Look at the main clause only: "Have you ever had (+ direct object)" is present perfect, and so the whole sentence is in the present perfect, too.
It could have been one of the following:
    Have you ever had a dog?
    Have you ever had a dog that barks all day?
    Have you ever had a dog that is always barking?
    Have you ever had a dog that used to follow you wherever you go?
and it would always be in the present perfect, irrespective of what follows "have ...had" (I've tried to put various verb tenses after "that" ... I hope my examples are correct, but I cannot guarantee it!)

Anonymous
My understanding is that for it to be 'perfect' the word 'have' (or a form of have) needs to be in there

Yes, it's present perfect if you have
have or has + past participle if it's active (have/has gone, have/has told, have/has written etc)
have or has + been + past participle if it's passive (have/has been told, have/has been written etc)

Anonymous
don't understand the 'passive' thing so I suppose I'm a bit unclear still

my comment about the passive referred to "are being followed":
you are following > present continuous, active
you are being followed > present continuous, passive

Does this help?

Re: Plz Correct me !

Cute572 — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:09:19 GMT

Thanks Goodman!

Could anyone tell me, in descriptive writing what tense usually writer choose.

And Guys please reply my 2nd post last two sentenses as well. And explain we can separate verb and subject i.e mirror and curtain, by using comma for emphasis like Feebs did?

Third sentence, I have made some changes. Please check this as well.

The soft curtain hanging and swinging [I am not using comma because it will separate both curtain Subject and hanging Verb] over the rood with moving winds and touching my chair [or desk] unintentionally. [This adverb is appropriate fits?]

Or following structure seemed less congested

The soft curtain hanging over a rood, and swinging with moving [can use melodious or rythemetic or some word instead of moving?] winds; [semicolon used here or comma ?] somehow, [comma is ok here?] unintentionally touches my chair at constant intervals. [puntucation is correct ?]

And what about this similar sentence grammar?

Above window, long rood holds the curtain from the upper edge of window. Is it ok to use and we would this underline part direct object ?

I request to explain each of these three versions with punctuation i used

Thanks !

Re: wife/girlfriend...advance/further

Dawnstorm — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:45:56 GMT

Grammar Geek
I think Nona's example about talking about your mother when she was a child and still referring to her as your mother is a good analogy.

First,. let me say that I agree usage-wise Nona and you. I also think that the mother-example is a good one - but it's not a perfect one.

It's a good one, because it demonstrates the difference between the time of action and the time of speaking. Noun references are routinely rooted in the present, even in past tense senteces, and the mother-example demonstrates that.

But there is a cognitive difference in "married his wife", as there is a semantic relationship between the verb "marry" and the noun "wife", in so far as the act of marrying results in wife-status. So it's quite possible that individual speakers (native speakers, even) have an intuitive correctness condition that doesn't allow the word "wife" as the object of the verb "marry", quite independent of tense. To summarise, I think part of the argument is lexical: what sort of words can the verb "marry" select as direct objects?

The thing is, disliking "wife" as the direct object of "marry" is reasonable. It's somewhat similar to "The Queen knighted the knight." (but without the etymological close relation that adds to the oddness). Or, "The army conscripted the soldier." Or "The jury pronounced the prisoner guilty."

It's an interesting discussion, really. Since "married his wife" doesn't sound odd to me at all (I'm not a native speaker), and since native speakers agree, I wonder why the tense relation between verb and noun-naming can override nosensical direct-object relation. (I do think it's a disjunction between the time-levels that's at issue here; the noun-reference is firmly in the present - referring to a specific person.)

Re: the middle voice option

Dawnstorm — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:09:34 GMT

Hi,

I'm really enjoying this. You're making me think.

I'm going to take your points out of sequence. I think I'm still replying to your post; if I misrepresent what you're saying, please correct me.

First, the summary of what I'm going to say: A lot depends on theory, and how you frame your terms. To me, ergativity in English is primarily a side topic to voice, and the only "marked" voice in English is the passive. All others rely on semantics and indirect evidence (such as your very detailled and useful post about the transitivity system in English). BUT: how do you frame the evidence there is systematically? In syntax? Make it part of the lexicon? In other words, what exactly is it that the term "ergative" adds to a combination of transitivity and lexical tagging? I'm still thinking about your suggestion to speak of "ergative structures" rather than "ergative verbs". This is an interesting approach, de-emphasising the lexicon in that respect; but I'm trying to ignore it for this post, mostly because I'm not done thinking it through.

Second, I think I've used the term "semantic" very loosely in my other post. There's reference, and then there's cognitive framing. (Or content and point of view.) The cognitive framing is harder to get at and interpret, mostly because these things aren't always immediately visible. We're talking about "ergative structures" in English, or the "middle voice", because we've noticed these constructions in other languages (Basque for ergativity; Ancient Greek for Middle voice; etc.). That is we have to strip away the structure and get down to the point-of-view meaning that the structures imply. And then we have to go back to English and look for expressions of said point-of-view meaning in this language. (Something similar is going on when linguists are probing "shall/will" along the lines of futurity/modality, within the discussion whether English has a future tense or not. The consensus is it doesn't, but the discussion - assuming "will/shall" as tense-modals - has been productive, if not conclusive.) But the thing is this: if you're bringing concepts to a language from outside (which is usual in comparative linguistics) you need an anchor; conventional structural methods - such as your "what syntactic operations yield well-formed usage?" approach - have their limitations. So do semantic (referential or framing). This makes ergativity/unaccusativity hard to think about, before you choose your approach.

Examples follow:

This is about the sentence, "He died a cruel death."

MrPedantic
The object here is a cognate object (it is implied in the verb itself) and thus belongs to a slightly different model. (I would say that it only exists to provide an adverbial opportunity: "he died a cruel death" = "he died in a cruel way".)

I agree that, framing-wise, the object functions much like an adverbial. But it's an "object" in syntax, which has implications that are incompatible with adverbials. Most relevant, here, "die" is now prone to passivisation.

"A cruel death was died," does sound odd (I'll get to it in a minute), but I wouldn't bat an eyelid at "Many deaths were died that night." Interestingly, it's hard to put this into the active voice, mostly because no subject seems appropriate. (?"The Soldiers died many deaths that night."; ?"The army died many deaths that night."...). To me, all the examples I can think of (plural nouns, collective nouns...) don't express the passive meaning. The closest I come is "Many people died that night." Anything else I can think of is of questionable grammaticality.

However, "A cruel death was died," although it sounds odd, doesn't sound ungrammatical in the least (at least not to me). It's also not a semantic problem; I understand the sentence perfectly well, both reference- and framingwise.

The reason, I think, this sounds odd is a pragmatic one. I think this one sounds odd because it's hard to find a context for this utterance that justifies the passive, which is a "marked construction". You generally expect "marked" constructions to be there for a reason. I suspect in the right context the above sentence would be perfectly fine. (It's a matter of Grice's conversational maxims, the maxim of manner, in particular.)

This is where the "frame-semantics" of syntactic constructions become complicated, I think. How do language structures tie in with cognitive structures (e.g. To what extent do we buy the Sapir-Worf hypothesis?)

So, from this I go to self-observation:

MrPedantic
and precisely because of that distinction, I would call "break" here ergative (ex. 5) , and "die" unaccusative (ex. 2).

See, I had the hardest time even to grasp what that meant, not now in this thread, but when I first discovered the distinction. That's because, learning English, I didn't train to see the difference. It wasn't necessary, as ergativity/unaccusativity isn't expressed through syntactic structures, but only indirectly through what operations are possible on the verb; this I pretty much took care off either through lexical list-tagging, or through collocation. If there is a hidden logic to it that I applied in learning, it never became conscious. (It's quite possible that I had a practical knowledge, but no discoursive one of this subject; but why, then, is it so hard to grasp?)

If we go back to the list and sift through the operations there, we'll find that "die" behaves different from "break" in the way we specified. But here's the catch: to apply that structural method, we have to assume that "break" in 5.a = "break" in 5.b = "break" in 5.c etc.; i.e. that "break" is the same lexical item in all these instances. That's because syntax has a hard time to differentiate between "signifier" and "signified", or "sign" and "concept".

Notice, for example, how your 5.a is already the transitive, while systematically it should be the intransitive agentive: 5.a *He broke. (i.e. "He caused/performed the action of breaking." as opposed to "He underwent the process of breaking," which is 5.b, now, and would be 5.c)

So I'd amend this, to:

5a. *He broke.

5b. He broke the plate

5c. The plate broke.

5d. The plate was broken.

5e. The broken plate

5f. The plate broke easily

And the comparison with "die" would be two-fold:

1. = sign; 2. = concept

5.1a He died.

5.2a He killed.

5.1b *He died the man.

5.2b He killed the man

5.1c The man died.

5.2c *The man killed.

5.1d *The man was died.

5.2d The man was killed.

5.1e *The died man [cf. The dead man.]

5.2e The killed man.

5.1f The man died easily. (<-- What's the difference to 5.1a? Should I add an * before it, as this is out of place, here?)

5.2f *The man killed easily. (<-- Is this not available, because 5.1f is available?)

5.1a, 5.1c, and 5.1f seem to be much the same. And this is the problem I have systematising a structural comparison. One possibility, I see is to re-cast 5a as reflexive 1. *He died himself./2. He killed himself. I might try to justify this through dying being a process you undergo, thus if you add an agentive/causative to core meaning (which is not in slot a, but in slot c) the verb becomes by necessity reflexive ("He caused himself to die.")

But these things are all a bit... tentative. I fear it's more rationalised than rational, if you get my drift.

[Interesting aside: you used the term "anticausative" alongside "ergative" and "unaccusative" for break in your thread. Bears repeating, as it's something I'm also still thinking about; a very interesting concept I haven't come across yet.]

MrPedantic
But I find a semantic difference too: the first presents the sign from the point of view of the reader, and the second, from the point of view of the writer.

Now, that's an interesting observation. I'd argue that the semantic difference is not referential (it refers to the same state of affairs), but it's a framing difference. If we view the sign as a proxy for the agent, we're importing the difference of active vs. voice into a construction that's free of the syntactic properties that normally accompany this framing device in English. "Reads," then, is ergative, while "says is a straightforward accusative verb (one that takes the accusative (which isn't marked in English - except, perhaps, for pronouns, where it's indistinguishable - morphologically - from the dative; the conventional term would be "direct object").

MrPedantic
Also, although the same few verbs tend to recur as examples in these discussions, actual usage is more imaginative.

That's what makes language so fascinating, isn't it? Nice example, there, too.

Re: Lie lay

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:51:34 GMT

Hi Mr Liat,

Yoong Liat
Please note that the past tense of lie is lay. (lie, lay, lain).

I know. In reply to the following post

julielai
I lie in bed. (present tense)
I lay myself in bed. (present tense)
Right??

CalifJim wrote

CalifJim
I believe we'd have to say yes! "myself" becomes the direct object, so "lay" is used. The reflexive use is not so common, however, as other uses ...

I said earlier that the presence of "myself" in "I lay myself in bed" makes the verb transitive. Hence, "lay" here is the present tense of lay (laid, laid) and NOT the past of lie (lay, lain) because the latter is intransitive and cannot take any direct object. I also repeated what CalifJim had already written, that is that lay (and I mean lay, laid, laid) is generally not used as a reflexive verb.

If you take "myself" out, then it obviously becomes a past tense (lie, lay, lain is intransitive), but that's another story.

Just to sum things up:

"I lie in bed": present simple, intransitive (lie, lay, lain)
"I lay in bed": past simple, intransitive (lie, lay, lain)
"I lay myself in bed": present simple, transitive (lay, laid, laid) (as I said, this sounds a bit odd to me, but I don't see why one should say it's ungrammatical).

Best.

Re: Lie lay

Anonymous — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:00:30 GMT

Yoong Liat
I lie in bed. (present tense)
I lay myself in bed. (present tense) -- 'lay' is the past, not present tense. I believe it is a careless mistake.

Were lay the past form of lie, it would be intransitive; as such, it couldn't be followed by a direct object (myself).

Therefore, lay in 'I lay myself in bed' is the present tense of lay, laid, laid -- although the use of lay as a reflexive verb sounds a bit odd to my ears.

I suggest reading again CalifJim's post.

Re: Verb tense/verb naming help...

Hoa Thai — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:23:24 GMT

Anonymous wrote:
what are intransitive verbs

Hi,

An intransitive verb is a verb that does not need a direct object to complete its meaning.
EX: Eat, sleep are intransitive verbs. - 'I eat then I sleep'.

Hoa Thai

Re: Part of Speech Question

Philip — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:16:34 GMT

Anonymous wrote:
Hi, quick question:

In the sentence that follows, what part of speech/ tense (gerund, present progressive...) or grammatical role (subject, verb) is "loving" and why? Furthermore, what grammatical role is "someone" and why? Essentially, what do you make of this sentence? It sounds a bit odd to my native ear.

"Loving someone is nice."

thanks,
shawn

Loving = gerund (noun)

someone = direct object of 'loving'

The two words make up a gerundive clause which serves as the complete subject of the sentence.

Re: with his eyes closed/shining

Philip — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 14:44:04 GMT

Angliholic wrote:
Philip wrote:
Angliholic wrote:

1. He enjoys listening to music, with his eyes closed.
2. He came out of the room, with his eyes shining.

The above two samples share a similar pattern, but one uses "past participle" and the other "present participle" at the end of the sentence. I find it difficult to explain this away to my pupils. Do you have a clear-cut way to explain it? Thanks.

How about "state of being" vs. "action".

The audience stood immediately after the performance, thrilled and applauding.

My horse arrived at the house after a good run, tired and sweating.

I hope this helps.

Thanks, Philip.

It helps me a lot, but I'm afraid that my pupils don't understand.

Maybe the following will help if they all sound right:

1. He closes his eyes. "closes" indicates a simple action

2. His eyes are closed. "closed" is the past participle used as an adjective to describe the 'state' of the eyes.

3. His eyes are shining. This is the present continuous tenses, indicating an on-going action.

I need your confirmation about sentence 2. Does "His eyes close" sound right? Yes. In #1 the verb is used transitively (with a direct object). In this sentence, the verb is used intransitively (no direct object): "His eyes close slowly as he drifts away to sleep".

Be sure to post for more help if necessary.