By Inflections, Clauses

Hi Anon, Your questions are excellent and show a good grasp of the issues. You're pushing me to the limit of my knowledge on the subject, which is a good thing. My opinions are based more on a long lifetime of listening to people use the expressions, and less on reading about them in text...

The list isn't meant to be exhaustive or carefully arranged. Any additions, corrections or further examples would be welcomed. 1 main verbs; lexical verbs (all verbs which are not auxiliaries or modals) 2 action verbs; event verbs; dynamic verbs (a verb which can be used in...

Welcome to EF, ZhukThere is no unanimous "correct" reply to your last question. As a rule, English is very flexible and in many cases liberal grammarians accept more than one alternative while some others insist on only one that they think is right. I would go for has, like you."Our teacher of...

Goodman wrote:"With" is not wrong in my opinion. "Having" sounds better to my ears. Now I couldn't help but ask if the following variation mean the same thing in your estimation? After having my purse stolen, I couldn't .... Having had my purse stolen, I couldn't ...... With my purse stolen...

Yankee wrote:I'd say you'll probably find a native speaker who has trouble adding -er and -est to one-syllable adjectives at about the same time that pigs start flying.Well, I'm now wondering if pigs can fly... I guess they can! If my Oxford Dictionary doesn't list "laxer", it means it...

1. The book being on the table is mine. (WRONG!) Why? 2. The book which is on the table is mine. If we perform whiz deletion in 2. (which/who + any inflections of to be can be deleted from a relative clause), we get 1.

Hi InchoI agree with the previous posters completely; I would just like to elaborate a little from a non-native speaker's standpoint to a non-native speaker. We're both foreigners, right?Since there are hardly any inflections in English, the word order is very rigid and certain phrases and...

Thank you to all those who have posted their suggestions to my little imagination game. Some have taken it very seriously thinking they would have to relearn English after the 'changes'. This was meant to be just a game, not for those wo take everything seriously, and of course in this game...

Hi C (or Cs): Complementizers: Words which introduce the sentence complement are termed complementizers. CP: Complement phrase. Matrix clause: the construction in which the complement phrase is embedded is called matrix clause. Infl: Sentences have their own heads. They take an abstract...

Hello Swiss Jake, Are you a German-speaking Swiss? If yes, then this should help a bit: 'Whom' is used in the accusative case, which is very obvious in German inflections but only seen in English prounouns, e.g. him, her, us, and whom. However, where in German there are two distinctive...