Julielai wrote: Just out of curiosity, Mr. P, how do you distinguish a native speaker who's learned a non-standard form of English from a decent non-native speaker? (e.g. How can you tell if a speaker born in India, Singapore or other Asian

Have to, on the other hand, does not have a strong deontic role. On the bare surface of it I take it as totally crazy (in AmE)! And yet, Deontically, must obliges the subject of the sentence to do something ( you must be

Hello td I'm not an expert or a student of linguistics. But we've had a few discussions about modals on this forum, and I've noticed three things: 1. Speakers of different dialects seem to respond differently to the same modal verb. 2.

Hello Milky I'm happy to accept your adjustment – I used 'you go' in my original because it would have seemed strange to define phrase A by embedding it in phrase B. So now we have: 1. Given my perception of the immediate situation, it is

Hello Inanc I see I have not quite answered your original question. What I really wanted to know was how would C refer to A's present state at T2. To my ears, your option 1 seems to meet the criteria: 1. He can't have done that!

Paco: I'm sorry if I mistook your message. Many of people here (including me) are still beginners of English learning. So it is nice if you write in a way everybody can't misunderstand you. One reason why we ESL feel auxiliary/modals

JTT wrote: You couldn't have done more than glanced at the box "May/might", at the 'commnet' site, Mr P. If you had, you'd have noticed the glaring inconsistencies that show "that different people DO NOT hear conditional and modal verbs slightly

Thanks for the links, Casi. Very interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if there were something in what you say about dialect variation. Previous threads have shown that different people hear conditional and modal verbs slightly differently.

Perceiving "used to" to be a modal verb leads ... used to" and "I use to" in a past sense. That's a spelling mistake, not a grammar mistake. It's a grammatical error in the same way that "didn't wanted

How do I seem to have fallen into that trap? Clearly, they would be effectively two different words. Your use of "would be" instead of "are" reveals that you evidently still don't understand the true meanings of "used