They had to have that specially made? The sentence is in the past tense. Since English lacks verbs for situations in which person A does something for person B on person B's request, a rather long and awkward structure is used instead: to have

Milky wrote: He has to go and He must go.> Well, I guess that would be part of the mastering part of the language - i.e. the complex part. It's easy for anyone to claim that English is not complex, or is much simpler than many other

The house will have needed repainting is grammatically correct but sounds odd. I can't think of a situation in which I could say it. With regard to your question, there is no such thing as a continuous gerund. Repainting is usually just called a

Sorry if this isn't the best place to join the thread, but, as Eccles memorably said in reply to "What are you doing here?", "Everybody's got to be somewhere". I'm not getting a sense from the discussion of why it

On 14 Jun 2004 00:38:45 GMT Greg Lee (Email Removed) wrote in under the entry "AUXILIARIES, AUXILIARY VERBS," in his *Columbia Guide ... of them have no past participles such as verbs have." I don't think there is much agreement

... under the entry "AUXILIARIES, AUXILIARY VERBS," in his *Columbia Guide to Standard American English," Kenneth G. Wilson includes "be" in ... verbs at all, since they behave differently from verbs: most of them have no

Dylan Nicholson wrote on 03 Jun 2004: Why do we say that "I will leave tomorrow" is in the future tense but "I leave tomorrow" or "I am leaving tomorrow" are not? Because it's a special case that doesn't

Dylan Nicholson wrote on 03 Jun 2004: Most grammar books will identify more than two tenses because ... each verb has only two indicative forms: present and past. So who gets to decide that a tense is identified solely by a 'verb ending'?