Search results for 'tag:English grammar tag:Clauses' matching tags 'English grammar' and 'Clauses'

Re: Which one is correct?

Clive — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:45:26 GMT

Hi,
Can you help me please ?

Which one is correct? And why?

--
Where is my wallet?
Where is the police station?
OR
Where my wallet is?
Where the police station is?

English grammar requires the inversion shown in #1 and #2.

However, note that you can say things like
I know where my wallet is.
Do you know where my wallet is?
In these examples, 'where my wallet is' is not a question, but simply a noun clause.

Best wishes, Clive

Best wishes, Clive

"...a kind of preface, "commenting" on the other clause, which contains..."

Peaceblinkfriend — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 09:52:26 GMT

The reporting clause becomes a kind of preface, commenting on the other clause, which contains the main message. (Quoted from the introduction of Collins COBUILD English Grammar )

How would you pronounce the word 'commenting' here? Would you put the stress on the first syllable, 'commenting' or the second, 'commenting'?

Thank you for your help.

PBF

'For example, although it is true to say that the noun group is the structure we choose for "the things" we want to talk about, it is not the only one.'

Peaceblinkfriend — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 09:35:18 GMT

For example, although it is true to say that the noun group is the structure we choose for the things we want to talk about, it is not the only one. Sometimes we want to talk about an event or an idea that is not easy to express in a noun group. Instead we can use a clause as the subject of another clause. e.g All I want is a holiday. (Quoted from the introduction of Collins COBUILD English Grammar )

I don't quite understand what it means by 'the things we want to talk about'. What is being referred to by 'the things'? For all it's worth, according to the glossary included in the grammar, a noun group is a group of words which acts as the subject, complement, or object of a clause, or as the object of a preposition. Also called nominal group or noun phrase.

Thank you

PBF

Re: Participles vs Gerunds

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:12:53 GMT

CB, you said "Participles are very often used to replace all manner of subordinate clauses. "
< This is also very often said in many Taiwanese/ Chinese/Japanese English Grammar Books>
Can you rewrite the origianl sentence "He has the gall of a shoplifter returning an item for a refund."
using "a subordinate clause" instead of "a partiiciple phrase"-- returning as iten for a refund?

Re: which

Cool Breeze — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:18:50 GMT

Philip
Others may disagree, but I definitely go with 'means', making it sound good, at least.

Hi Philip

No one with a basic knowledge of English grammar will disagree. The antecedent is the entire main clause.

Re: adjective phrases

Velimir — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:09:33 GMT

Hello Anonymous,

In your sentences there is no adjective phrases.A phrase is a name used in the english grammar to label a group of words which acts as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence,which means that you need at least two words to label some part of the sentence a phrase. Words,phrases and clauses are three building blocks of speech and proper distinction between these elements is an essential step and the starting point in every analysis.
Adjective phrase consists of the head of the phrase,i.e adjective, and various pre-modifying and postmodifying elements.For example,

It is too hot for this time of the year.

In this sentence the whole phrase "too hot for this time of the year" is an adjective phrase which functions as a subject complement. We could say this same in a brief manner :

It is hot.

but we felt like we wanted:

1. to accentuate the meaning of hot by premodifying the head "hot" with the intensifying adverb "too"

2. and also to specify that we refer our assertion to some particular part of the year

Therefore,you get adjective phrases when you're trying to convey more information about what you mean or feel about the matter in question.

The first sentence you've quoted for example should be analysed like:

1. Carnivores are eaters of meat.

Carnivores - plural form of noun ,acts as the subject of the sentence

are - linking verb

Eaters of meat - noun phrase ,acts as a subject complement

The other two sentences follow the same syntactic pattern : subject -> linking verb -> subject complement

Best regards

Re: Proficiency alongside "poverty".

Cool Breeze — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:58:49 GMT

Anonymous
In that respect, I would like to know when and how the auxiliary "do" appeared in English. What kind of people introduced it into the English language?
I would like to know who decided about the value of tenses of the Past. They do not correspond to the value of the tenses of the Past in latinoÃ¯d languages. Who can give me answers ?
In this debate, I do not think there is an evolution towards simplicity nor towards more complicated structures. The
communities of native speakers of a language constantly change the rules and the meaning of words (although the main core remains more or less stable for facility reasons.)
Ethnic languages are tools of inclusion and mainly exclusion (internal and external). That is why there are so many exceptions.
No ethnic language is that easy to learn. When I say "to learn" I mean to learn it to be on equal footing with a native speaker of the language. There will always be a difference, a discrimination.
From what I have experienced ( I am very interested by languages), there is no easy language. All has been done by training.
There is no natural language : everything has been constructed by Man.
I invite the readers to learn an interlanguage such as Esperanto, compare it with your mother tongue and with languages you have studied later. 90% to 95% of the time is spent to the learning of exceptions. That is why a language without exception such as Esperanto is ten to twenty times faster to learn than ethnic languages.
It is fascinating to see how a universal congress of Esperanto works and to compare it with an international congress in only one language. Many prejudices fall.
Maybe I am opening new interests in the debate..
George/Belgium

Do existed in Old English more than a thousand years ago as a regular verb and meant to cause. It is impossible to say who introduced it to English. It's use as an auxiliary in questions and negations was established in Shakespeare's day when it was correct to say both

I know not him
and
I do not know him.

It is very common that the usage of tenses varies from language to language, especially if the languages are not closely related. No reasons can usually be given for this. You might just as well ask why the usage of tenses in the Romance languages differs from that in English. Linguistic changes are often shrouded in the past and there is no knowing why they occurred.

All words and grammatical structures people are not used to sound wrong and/or odd and therefore people usually object to changes that are about to happen in their lifetime and think the language is deteriorating. This is true about all languages, not just English. People tend to think a language is at its most beautiful right now and any change will just make it worse.

English grammar has become so simple over the centuries that I cannot envisage it becoming any simpler without the risk of English becoming even more inexact than it is now. However, not all changes have made the language simpler in structure. In Old English there was just one relative pronoun and it had only one form. That made communication with relative clauses very awkward and it wasn't a great surprise that who, whom, whose, what and which began to be used as relatives to facilitate communication.

CB

Re: Comparative and superlative adjectives

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:01:34 GMT

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your feedback on my questions.However, I am not sure of your latter explanation. The question: " Which is the most useful thing to own: a computer or a car?", according to you, is incorrect. But the second one, " Which is more useful thing to own: a computer or a car?" is correct. Your answer is based on the English grammar rules of comparisons of adjectives; that's great. In fact, my colleagues and I have the same understanding following the grammar rules of comparisons, but the correct answer to this question is the first one not the second one, according to the Cutting Edge Coursebook, Pre-Intermediate, Longman. You see, I did't want to tell you the correct answer from any sources because I was afraid of the thing that happened to my first experience " Noun clauses vs. adjective clauses."
In addition, I have also some more experience in finding such a kind of this comparative adjective sentence on the Internet. Its explanation is beyond our best. The author always explains it in another diffrent way because it is a tricky sentence. He or she suggests us that we should not think of only the two things in question, but also we should ......... The question is: Which is...........................(good) team in this season: Manchester United or Liverpool? Please tell me the answer- comparative or superlative?

Thank you very much for your consideration and cooperation.

Best regards,

Sothy Sin
Cambodia

Re: Is this a right use of a semicolon?

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:06:16 GMT

I doubt that it is more nearly acceptable that we reproduce the exact same thread with a new date on it.

The word that I mispelled was "clause." If you reread the post, I misspelled several words. I was copying from the Gregg reference manual (an English grammar / usage reference manual) as fast as I could.

Re: grammar question

Clive — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:34:50 GMT

Hi,

Is this sentence grammatically correct? She wrote twenty novels (of which two were apparently unpublished), three poems and a play. (I have doubts about the relative clause between brackets.

It's not good for your English grammar to get into the habit of using brackets. Why not say it this way?

She wrote three poems , a play, and twenty novels of which two were apparently unpublished.

Best wishes, Clive