Search results for 'tag:Learning English tag:Verbs' matching tags 'Learning English' and 'Verbs'

Re: the verb "to bind"

Avangi — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:56:52 GMT

I see no problem in using them interchangeably in your original example. Conventions are often developed within a community of experts such as nuclear biologists, etc. They may bend what the academic grammarians would recommend, but I don't see anything like that in the present case. It's an interesting one, because the intransitive version seems to require an object, resembling "I do something to you." (I hit you. - transitive) (I stick to you. I bond to you. - intransitive) I'm sure it's deceptive to someone learning English, but I assure you as a native speaker the distinction is clear.

There may be some context where "bond DNA" would be favored over "bond to DNA," but I can't think of one offhand. The process and the result are obviously the same in both versions.

I'm puzzled by your suggestion that "to bind" is a great example of tr. and intr. having different meanings. I would have said the opposite.

I can't seem to come up with anything. We harden the steel by heat treating it. This epoxy hardens in only five minutes. The major difference between this and the "bond" example is that in the bond example, X molecule is the subject of both sentences. X molecule is the actor, whether tr. or intr. But in the hardening example, epoxy is the subject of the intr. verb, while we is the subject of the tr. verb. I think that's the special thing about the bond example that makes it so hard to figure.

Hopefully California Jim will stop by. He's quite conversant in the field.

- A.

Re: who/did

Tanit — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:05:59 GMT

Newguest
Hi guys

Why in this question we do not use "did": Who brought you up? (instead of: Who did bring you up?)

And in this one we do: Who did you look up to? (instead of: Who you looked up to?)

Hi,

It has to do with the role of "who". Is it the subject (as in Who brought you up?) or is it the object (as in Who did you look up to?)?
Here's a brief extract from a page from BBC Learning English that explains the differences between these two types of sentences:

When the question word is the subject - 'who' in this example - the auxiliary 'do' isn't needed and the word order is:
subject (who) + verb (wants) + object or complement (more coffee).
A. Who wants more coffee?

...

Here's one where the question word is acting as an object:
A. Who did you meet there?
B. I met an old friend.
In this example, 'who' is the question word and 'did' is the auxiliary.
'Who' is referring to the object of the sentence, the person I met.

Compare:
Who saw you? >>> "Who" is the subject. You were seen by somebody.
Who did you see? >>> "Who" is the object. You saw somebody. (Strictly speaking, this one should be "Whom did you see?" ... but in everyday conversations "Who did you see?" is far more common).

Re: Hey Guys, Need Help

Tanit — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:37:47 GMT

Hi,

New2grammar
Could you try to convince me why the abrupt change of tense makes sense?

Why should it make sense? After all, we're talking about English grammar!
Anyway, somebody says it's an instance of unreal past ...

BBC Learning English

We sometimes use past tenses to describe things in the present or future that are imagined or unreal.
It's time we went.
We are using It's time... here to say that something is not happening, but it should be happening. Compare also the following:
It's time we left. Our son will be home soon and he doesn't have a house key.
It's about time you started looking for a job. You can't depend on us all the time. It's high time you started to fend for yourself.

...we can use the construction it's time to or it's time for + object + to as alternatives to the unreal use of past forms to express this idea:
It's time for you to think seriously about what you want to do in your life.
It's time you thought seriously about what you want to achieve in your life.
It's time to reflect on how you want your life to proceed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/learnit/learnitv347.shtml

UNREAL PAST

The past tense is sometimes used in English to refer to an 'unreal' situation. So, although the tense is the past, we are usually talking about the present, e.g. in a Type 2 conditional sentence:
If an elephant and a mouse fell in love, they would have many problems.
Although fell is in the past tense, we are talking about a hypothetical situation that might exist now or at any time, but we are not referring to the past. We call this use the unreal past.
Other situations where this occurs are:

after other words and expressions like'if'(supposing, if only, what if);
after the verb 'to wish';
after the expression 'I'd rather..'
(http://www.edufind.com/English/Grammar/IF10.cfm)

... and somebody says it's subjunctive. See also:
http://www.englishforums.com/English/ChangingTenses/dqcdx/post.htm
http://www.englishforums.com/English/WhichSentencesAreCorrect/zjbhp/post.htm

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: feeling happy

Grammar Geek — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:18:03 GMT

It seems when people are learning English, there are a number of verbs they are first taught cannot take the progressive, the -ing form.

Then, when their English becomes more advanced, they learn that these verb (liking, loving, feeling, being) CAN take the -ing form when you want to emphasize that the situation is CURRENT and likely to change.

You are BEING a jerk is different from You ARE a jerk becuase I mean that only at this very moment are you are jerk. You are not usually.

I am LOVING this salmon dish - Usually I don't like salmon, but this is great. Right now, I am really enjoying it.

It's the same with She is feeling happy. At this very moment, that's how she is. Maybe she's been a bit sad lately, but knowing that there will be friends and cake at John's house later is making her feel a bit happier right now.

Re: for learning English vs. to learn English

Cool Breeze — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:41:36 GMT

1. Only I'm going to Spain to learn Spanish is right. For learning Spanish could be used in a sentence like: This is a good book for learning Spanish.

2. In theory, the preposition is needed since live can't be used as a transitive verb: He lives a place. We have to say: He lives in a place. In practice, many people omit the preposition and say: I have a place to live.

Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:30:26 GMT

Hi everyone

I just wondered if anyone could help - I have to write a profile of a chinese learner of English (completely made up). In it I must put any difficulties that the learner has in learning English as an L2. I have got so far:

Intonation transfer from L1 may cause them to be perceived as rude/inconsiderate, more serious transfer may affect comprehensiveness.
No inflections in L1 - tenses difficult to learn in L2 as L1 has no true tenses and concept of time is expressed by adverbs/implicit or contextual assumptions.
Difficulty distinguishing [r] & - Does anyone know why this is as I can't find a reason?!!
Prepositions such as 'on', 'in' & 'at' have one chinese translation in many contexts, 'zai' - may be confused resulting in phrases such as 'on Taiwan' instead of 'in Taiwan'.
Use of awkward gerunds e.g. 'no noising', excessive use of verbs ending in 'ing' e.g. 'do not climbing', confusion of 'ed' & 'ing' verbs e.g. 'i am bored' vs 'i am boring' --- all of these errors occur because verbs are not conjugated in chinese, for tense or pronoun.
No equivalent word for 'the' so may be used excessively when not needed e.g. 'The China' or missed out when needed. May also be confused with 'a'/'an'.
Confusion over countable and uncountable nouns, use of 'how much?' vs 'how many?' - leads to phrases such as 'I want a soup' & 'a lot of shoe'. This is due to there not being plurals in chinese - no inflections.

Switching between 'he' & 'she' - Does anyone know why this is?

If anyone can think of anymore it would be greatly appreciated or if anyone knows the answers to my questions about gender switching and distinguishing [r] & this would also help a lot!!

Thank you in advance.

Shannon

Re: I have question about Adverb and Adjectives in comparison

Clive — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:34:09 GMT

Hi,

can you give me examples with "

Some are irregular - (well/better/best), (badly/worse/worst). "

Tom, Fred and Jim are all learning English. In their last exam, Jim's mark was A, Tom got a B, and Fred got a C.

Tom speaks English better than Fred, but Jim speaks English best.

Tom speaks English worse than Jim, but Fred speaks English worst.

Best wishes, Clive

Re: Singular or a plural verb with a collective noun?

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:23:52 GMT

Dear Marina, I am glad you care a lot for English plural forms of nouns. You are probably learning English as a Second Language.

The noun police is followed by a plural verb because it is a very big group of people. For one Individual, we talk of a Policeman or a policewoman. For the word Family, I need to check with other coleagues.

Chris, a Student

Kigali Institute of Education

Faculty of Arts and Languages

English and Literature With Education (Year III)

Verb Recommend+Infinitive forms

Instructor1955 — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:30:37 GMT

Hello taechers

While taking some English grammar tests, I have come across this sentence :

"If you don't already have them, we recommend you buy copies of both if you are serious about learning English. "

I know that's grammatically correct, still, Talking with my American colleagues at work,they were all saying the verb recommend is always followed by an infiniteve verb with "TO". For Example :" The Doctor recommended him to loose weight "

What's your opinion?

Regards

The Instructor1955