Search results for 'tag:Genitives tag:Tenses' matching tags 'Genitives' and 'Tenses'

Re: several grammar questions (2)

Avangi — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:45:23 GMT

Hela wrote:

Dear teachers,

1) How would you qualify this time of genitive, please? Which "title" would you give it? Is it some sort of "human activities"? but I don't really like this.

love's spirit, science's influence, my life's aim, duty's call . wow! I remember genitive as a Latin case 60 years ago. What do you mean by "time"? Your examples are all possessive. Joe's dog= the dog of Joe. Love's spirit=the spirit of love.   What am I missing?

2) Which tenses would you use in the following sentences and why?

a) Weather conditions have improved/improved (?) during the the last few days. Present perfect means the action has been [recently] completed. Simple past would mean it happened at some time in the past. The use of "during" means it was a continuing process. "Last few days" means it continued up to the present, at which time it was completed.(Present Perfect)

- Is it possible to say "the weather conditions" or is it definitely wrong? yes

- can we say "during the last days" = without "few"? yes, but it sometimes means the last days of the universe.

b)There has been / was (?) a real fall (?) in that town's population over/during (?) the last decade.Same tense situation as example 2.  Something happened over an extended period which just ended. "Over" and "during" both work, in my humble opinion.

c)He ~~should~~ showed/assured ??? him that he doesn't have the time / time (?) to pick up the children from/at (?) school. I say both choices are acceptable in both your red group and your black group.

Woops! where did the colors go?

- Would you please tell me if the article here is obligatory and why? Why not? the time=the time required / time=any time   Both work.

- which preposition should be used? are both possible? ANSWERED

3) âDid you do both maths exercises? The first was easier than the second.â âThat's right, the first was the easier of the two.â

- Is the "M" of math capitalized ? + should we say "math" or "maths" (with âsâ = Br. Eng ; without Â« s Â» = Am. Eng ?) Math would be capitalized if you said, "I just signed up for Math." I doubt "maths" would be used in this context in either domain, but I could be wrong.

- Would you please tell me when one should use âbothâ and âthe twoâ? Is it wrong to say âdid you do the two maths exercises...â and âthe first was the easier of bothâ ? Both choices work in the first example but only "the two" works in the second.

4) My mother left on her holiday/vacation (correct?)/ went on holiday(~~s?)~~/vacation a few weeks ago.

5) I have to pick her up at/from (?) the airport on her return / when she arrives (correct?).I think these are all okay. "From" would be questioned by some.

Many thanks,   Man, I needa break!

Hela

several grammar questions (2)

Hela — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:26:22 GMT

Dear teachers,

1) How would you qualify this time of genitive, please? Which "title" would you give it? Is it some sort of "human activities"? but I don't really like this.

love's spirit, science's influence, my life's aim, duty's call .

2) Which tenses would you use in the following sentences and why?

a) Weather conditions have improved/improved (?) during the the last few days.

- Is it possible to say "the weather conditions" or is it definitely wrong?

- can we say "during the last days" = without "few"?

b)There has been / was (?) a real fall (?) in that town's population over/during (?) the last decade.

c)He should him that he doesn't have the time / time (?) to pick up the children from/at (?) school.

- Would you please tell me if the article here is obligatory and why?

- which preposition should be used? are both possible?

3) âDid you do both maths exercises? The first was easier than the second.â âThat's right, the first was the easier of the two.â

- Is the "M" of math capitalized ? + should we say "math" or "maths" (with âsâ = Br. Eng ; without Â« s Â» = Am. Eng ?)

- Would you please tell me when one should use âbothâ and âthe twoâ? Is it wrong to say âdid you do the two maths exercises...â and âthe first was the easier of bothâ ?

4) My mother left on her holiday/vacation (correct?)/ went on holiday(s?)/vacation a few weeks ago.

5) I have to pick her up at/from (?) the airport on her return / when she arrives (correct?).

Many thanks,

Hela

Re: sentence to a 3 year's imprisonment

Cool Breeze — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:48:48 GMT

Grammar Geek wrote:
What is the context for It's 10 minutes' meeting or It's a 10 minutes' meeting? Those don't sound normal at all! So I'm missing something.

It's a meeting of 10 minutes sounds grammatical, but not natural. But my mind doesn't rebel against it like the two above.

Hi GG

I was concentrating more on the genitive than the verb. However, if a goup of people has a 10-minute meeting every Monday morning, I might use the present tense to inform a new employee about the meeing and its duration: It's a 10 minutes' meeting. I didn't consider the tense to be the gist of the matter, and anyone can of course change it to whatever sounds better. I just wanted to give my opinion about the structures I think correct in such expressions:

It's a two-mile walk.
It's a two miles' walk.
It's two miles' walk.
It's a walk of two miles.

Cheers
CB

Re: Joy to the world, the lord is "COME" ????

Cool Breeze — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 20:06:53 GMT

I always thought it was a remnant of the French (Norman Invasion, 1066). There is a handful of verbs in French conjugated with "to be" rather than "to have" in the passÃ© composÃ© (past) tense. Rise, [to be] born, arrive, leave, go (all "coming and going" verbs) are some examples. We also sing "He is risen" and we allow for "he is gone" as well as "he has gone".

Hi Philip

There has been vacillation between be and have as the perfect auxiliary in the Germanic languages - that's what I really meant to say in my previous post - but to my knowledge no one has ever maintained this usage derives from French. As a matter of fact, French had little effect on English grammar in terms of grammatical structures although the number of loan words is remarkable.

One of the structures derived from French is the of-genitive, which most scholars believe is based on the de-structure of the French language. And of course the word order of e.g. court martial reflects French grammar.

The only tenses Old English had were the present tense and the preterite (past tense); in other words, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th century didn't take the perfect, pluperfect and the future tense with them from the continent.

Cheers
CB

Re: article

Cool Breeze — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:10:23 GMT

Tung Quoc wrote:
Will you say in the past tense or in past tense? Why?

Q

Grammatical terms are normally used with the definite article:

The word is in the genitive.
Don't use the future tense here.
That sentence is in the passive (voice).

Cheers
CB

Re: Which language is the easiest to learn

Kabayan — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 04:48:48 GMT

Bahasa Indonesia is the easiest to learn. It has no tenses, no genitive, do has simple pluralisation, no tonal, has flexible structure.

Re: "His being..." vs "Him being..."

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:45:54 GMT

Yulysess wrote:
Hi creolejazz,

The rule you search lies, I think, in the grammatical unit called "Nominal Clauses/ Nominal-ing clauses, that is, participle clauses", or as pieanne illustrated above, gerunds.

The commomest type of participle clause is that which has no subject.

When a is subject required, there is sometimes a choice as follows:

GENITIVE case in formal style:

I'm surprised at his/John's making that mistake

OBJECTIVE or COMMON case (for personal pronouns or nouns, espectively) in informal style:

I'm surprised at him/ John making that mistake.

But beware the subject

if it is an inanimate noun phrase which would not normally take the genitive case
use objective case and a pronoun in the objective case is disliked in subject position.

After the verbs such as

"hear, keep smell, start, stop, watch" use objective case

After the verbs such as

"avoid, enjoy, suggest" use possessive case

After the verbs such as

"dislike, excuse,fancy, forgive, imagine, like, mind, miss, prevent" you can use one of the both cases.

for a refence book "A University Grammar of English" Randolph QUIRK, Sidney GREENBAUM- Longman, p 321,366

I canât make head nor tail of this.

The rule you search lies, I think, in the grammatical unit called "Nominal Clauses/ Nominal-ing clauses, that is, participle clauses", or as pieanne illustrated above, gerunds.

Right gotcha. Nominal clause = participle clause; nominal-ing clause = gerunds clause

The commomest type of participle clause is that which has no subject.

When a is subject required, there is sometimes a choice as follows:

GENITIVE case in formal style:

I'm surprised at his/John's making that mistake

Hold on! Thatâs not a participle clause. Participle clauses are adjectives used to modify nouns. What you have there is a gerund but you begin by defining participle clauses.

OBJECTIVE or COMMON case (for personal pronouns or nouns, espectively) in informal style:

I'm surprised at him/ John making that mistake.

Firstly, what is the 'common' case? Has it something to do with gender?

Secondly, if you are using the objective case then what is âmakingâ? Itâs not a lexical (main) verb because it doesnât have a tense. So what is it?

But beware the subject

What the subect of the clause (âhimâ/âJohnâ)?

There is no subect of the clause as there is no lexical verb. In, âJohn was making a mistakeâ, you have a tense and therefore you have a lexical verb and hense John is the subject. However, âJohn making a mistakeâ is a noun phrase. There is no subject.

if it is an inanimate noun phrase which would not normally take the genitive case use objective caseâ¦

Again, it may sound right to the ear, but if one uses the objective case then we donât have a lexical verb what we have is a noun phrase:

ââ¦it making that mistakeâ

ââ¦him making that mistakeâ

â¦and why not use the possessive with inanimate subjects? We use the possessive with all kinds of nouns: a weekâs work, dutyâs call, etc.

and a pronoun in the objective case is disliked in subject position.

Wait a minute, didnât you just say that we had a choice? Besides, if the genitive case makes grammatical sense with inanimate objects then it must also make grammatical sense with humans.

After the verbs such as

"hear, keep smell, start, stop, watch" use objective case

After the verbs such as

"avoid, enjoy, suggest" use possessive case

After the verbs such as

"dislike, excuse,fancy, forgive, imagine, like, mind, miss, prevent" you can use one of the both cases.

Would you please give me a few examples of these, thanks

Sorry, if my tone indicates any frustration. I'm struggling to understand your post and it is frankly frustrating for me. Please would you or someone address my questions - thanks!

(edited to reduce the blank space)

Re: Your being?

taiwandave — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:05:58 GMT

Miriam,

Many thanks for your thoughtful expansion of Pem's analysis. I'll first address the specific questions you've raised, then re-state more thoroughly the case which the Cambridge book is making for the gerund's redefinition.

Consider the following two sentences:

1. I can't stand your being here.
2. I can't stand your haircut.

A dependent genitive such as "your" requires a noun object. What follows a dependent genitive is, therefore, surely a noun or noun-like. This fact supports the conclusion that "being" in [1] is what is traditionally called a gerund.

The suggestion that "being" might be a verb with "your" as its subject seems absurd: a dependent genitive (e.g. your, our, my, their) cannot fill this role. The following are ungrammatical:

3. His car is blue, but my is red.
4. Our is the right way.

We are traditionally taught that the gerund is a noun-like form that retains some of the characteristics of a verb, and as such is distinct from the present participle. This is, as you noted, a very confusing concept in English grammar.

Some -ing forms really are full-fledged nouns: words such as "building" are, as you said, completely nominalised. But does "building" in "that building is over there" really belong in same category as "being" in [1]? To say that a word is part-noun, part-verb: does that not violate the very idea of what a noun is?

The Cambridge authors would sooner bend other grammatical rules than blur the fundamental distinction between noun and verb. For example, they would consider the dependent genitive in a sentence such as [1] to be a acting as a subject, something that [3] and [4] show as being completely ungrammatical. This they justify in part by pointing out other ways that the dependent genitive in [1] behaves differently from that in [2]. For example, what happens when it is omitted:

5. I can't stand being here.
6. I can't stand haircut.

In [5], the meaning has changed but it is not ungrammatical. They see this as showing "subject-like" behaviour on the part of the dependent genitive, analogous to a to-infinitival that remains grammatical when stripped of its subject:

7. I arranged for him to leave the country.
8. I arranged to leave the country.

Note that the authors consider the "for" in [7] as belonging to the category of subordinators, and to be marking the beginning of a subordinate clause in which "for him" is the subject of the to-infinitival.

At this point I'd like to add a disclaimer of my own. My background is electrical engineering, not English. When I recently took on some English teaching work, I realized that I knew very little about grammar. Since none of the other teachers at the school -- and I'm curious if this is typical -- knew much about grammar, I realized I'd have to learn it on my own. The books I initially found weren't satisfactory, so I ordered Quirk's "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language". While on Amazon, I read a review that mentioned the Cambridge book so I ordered it as well.

I had previously assumed that English grammar was a static field: that it had been boiled down to a set of fixed rules and lists of exceptions, and that any controversy as there once may have been had long since died out. I was surprised and excited to realize that quite the opposite is true.

The rules of grammar as traditionally taught represent a view of linguistics that is decades out of date. Yet linguistics research has up to now had very little influence on commonly-accepted methods of analyzing English grammar. Why? Because it tends to be so dense and jargon-saturated that no one but linguists can understand it. With the publication of the Cambridge book, that has changed. It's clear, it's understandable, and it represents a serious challenge to the old ways of thinking about grammar.

While I've made my best attempts to paraphrase some of the points that the book is making, whatever I write is obviously a very poor (possibly even misleading) substitute for reading the book itself -- something I'd urge you to do.

I'll conclude with a verbatim excerpt concerning the topic we're discussing:

A gerund is traditionally understood as a word derived from a verb base which functions as or like a noun, as in:

Destroying the files was a serious mistake.
I regret destroying the files.

"Destroying the files" could be replaced by "the destruction of the files", where "destruction" is clearly a noun. The formulation "as or like" is used in talking of the functional resemblance between a gerund or a noun, leaving open the issue of whether the word is a verb or a noun. Dictionaries tend to define the gerund as a verbal noun, but there are strong grounds for analysing "destroying" in [both sentences] as a verb, and for drawing a distinction between such words and others ending in -ing which genuinely are nouns and which we refer to as "gerundial nouns":

He was expelled for killing the birds. [form of verb]
She had witnessed the killing of the birds. [gerundial noun]

The verb-forms are traditionally divided into gerunds and present participles, as illustrated in:

Gerunds:
Inviting the twins was a bad mistake.
We're thinking of giving them one more chance.
I remember seeing them together.
She found talking to Pat surprisingly stressful.

Present participles:
Those living alone are most at risk.
Not having read his book, I can't comment.
She is mowing the lawn.
We saw him leaving the post office.
I caught them reading my mail.

Historically the gerund and present participle of traditional grammar have different sources, but in Modern English the forms are identical. No verb shows any difference in forms in [the above examples], not even "be". The historical difference is of no relevance to the analysis of the current inflectional system. We reject an analysis that has gerund and present participle as different forms syncretized throughout the class of verbs. We have therefore just one inflectional form of the verb marked by the -ing suffix; we label it with the compound term "gerund-participle" for the verb-form, as there is no reason to give priority to one or the other of the traditional terms.

This grammar also takes the view that even from the point of view of syntax (as opposed to inflection) the distinction between gerund and present participle is not viable, and we will therefore also not talk of gerund and present participle constructions.

In summary, words with a verb base and the -ing suffix fall into the following three classes:

1. She had witnessed the killing of the birds. [gerundial noun]

2. a. He was expelled for killing the birds. [gerund-participle form of verb]
b. They are entertaining the prime minister. [gerund-participle form of verb]

3. The show was entertaining. [participial adjective]

-----------

Note: following is the definition they give for the term "syncretism":

When two or more lexemes are identical we say there is "syncretism" between them, or that they are "syncretized". For example, there is syncretism between the preterite [past tense] and past participle of "want": both are realized as "wanted".

Re: English is a crazy language

pemmican — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:54:21 GMT

Deepa, I totally agree with you!

As examples always enlighten a lot, I'll give you some impressions of my mother tongue German:
I have to say that English in many cases is simpler than my native language. You mentioned e.g. the gender of a noun which is usually expressed by the article. In English, there are no genders, everything is "the", while in German you have three genders: der (masculine), die (feminine), das (neuter). With human beings, the grammatical gender usually agrees in the natural gender as 'the man' is 'der Mann', the woman is die Frau and the child, when you don't know whether it is a boy or a girl is das Kind. But - already here you have exceptions as e.g. the word for "girl" is neuter: das MÃ¤dchen even if it's obvious that a girl is female!

According to the gender, also the adjectives have to be inflected:
a good man is in German ein guter Mann
a good woman is eine gute Frau
and a good child is ein gutes Kind.

For all the "simple" nouns you have to learn their genders by heart as there is no rule to cling to when you need to know the noun's gender. If you have a compound word, i.e. a noun that consists of two or more own nouns, e.g. buttercup or sunshine, the word takes over the gender of the last noun -> sun is Sonne in German, feminine: die Sonne, Schein is masculine: der Schein, so sunshine is masculine, too: der Sonnenschein.

Speaking of compound words, German has an incredible ability to form new words out of already existing words. Unlike English, that takes over Latin terms to get new words, e.g. accept, surprise, German forms them this way: accept = annehmen from nehmen =take and an = on => take on; surprise = Ã¼berraschen from Ã¼ber = over and rasch =quick => overquick, etc.
Compound words can be put together out of many single words - they are written as one word then, e.g. "DampfschiffahrtskapitÃ¤nsuniformfarbe" which means "colour of the uniform of a captain of a steamboat". Farbe = colour here is the last word and has the feminine gender, so the whole compound term is feminine: "Die DampfschiffahrtskapitÃ¤nsuniformfarbe".

English, with some very few old exceptions, usually adds an -s to the noun and you have its plural form: dog-dogs, car-cars, tree-trees.
German nouns form their plural in different ways:
adding -(e)n: Frau-Frauen (woman)
adding -s: Auto-Autos (car)
adding -e: Brot-Brote (bread)
adding nothing: Teller-Teller (plate)
umlauting the stem vowel: Vater-VÃ¤ter (father)
umlauting the stem vowel and adding -er: Haus-HÃ¤user (house)
umlauting the stem vowel and adding -e: Sohn-SÃ¶hne (son)
...

Also the cases in German still have their own forms, that means instead of forming a case by taking a preposition and keeping the noun in its actual form, German nouns add endings and in addition, the article changes as well:

------------------------Singular-------Plural
Nominative case --- das Haus-------die HÃ¤user------------the house------the houses
Genitive case--------des Hauses----der HÃ¤user------------of the house---of the houses
Dative case----------dem Haus(e)--den HÃ¤usern-----------to the house---to the houses
Accusative case-----das Haus-------die HÃ¤user-------------the house------the houses

(this is only one paradigm though - other nouns follow a different pattern)

Verbs in German still keep inflecting endings for all the persons, also in past tense, sometimes an umlaut occurs in 2nd and 3rd person singular, eg: tragen (to carry)

Present--------------Past
ich trage-------------ich trug-----------I carry------------I carried
du trÃ¤gst-------------du trugst---------you carry---------you carried
er trÃ¤gt--------------er trug------------he carries---------he carried
wir tragen-----------wir trugen--------we carry----------we carried
ihr tragt-------------ihr trugt-----------you carry---------you carried
sie tragen-----------sie trugen---------they carry--------they carried

As you can see here, there are also two different forms of "you": du and ihr. You have to differenciate between whom you're adressing: If it's only one person, you use 'du', if it's 2 or more people you use 'ihr' - and additionally: If you want to address one or more person who you don't know very well, you have to use the polite form "Sie" - so all in all there are 3 pronouns for English "you".
Of course, also these pronouns have different forms when they are used in the four cases.

Ok, I'll leave it with this now - I don't wanna type a whole Grammar here *hehe*
I hope you can now see that in many parts, Grammar English is a lot easier than in other languages. BUT on the other hand I have to say that there are also things that are easier in German - tenses for example. German e.g. doesn't have progressive tenses and it's also not necessary to use future tense when referring to future happenings, usually everyone uses the present tense instead...

But *blahblah* - I hope this info might have helped you a bit. Comparing languges to each other often opens doors, you haven't seen before and it's usually very helpful to have a closer look also at Grammar of your native language when learning a foreign language.