Search results for 'tag:Negations tag:Pronouns' matching tags 'Negations' and 'Pronouns'

Re: Grammar rules - check for correctness - a kind teacher please :)

Angle1 — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:30:38 GMT

Here are some examples

The main point is to explain the correct answer
The sentences are little-bit childisch ;they are some modified sentences. I am afraid that my explanations seems to be a little childisch, too. So please help me how to turn it into the right explanation.

Mary was real angry because Jack didnÂ´t show up

Real >> really - we use an adverb to determine the adjective

Fewer of the passangers is sick today

Fewer >> One - the verb is refers to singular, so we need to use singular pronoun

I asked my brother whom was on the phone

Whom >> who â Whom i sused in object case and with pronouns â we need a subject for the verb in the second clause

Jorge doesnÂ´t have no bullets in his rifle

No >> any - we should avoid double negation in written English. We could use either has + no or negation + any

I am just a little confused whether or not to go on exam.

Whether to be or not to be â I know how it should be, but I cannot explain it :/

Having be a dancer myself, I have excellent posture

Having be >> beeing â but how to explain it ???

I never did like these kind of exercises

These >> that â but could it be also this if I were pointing at it?

Kind is singular, so we need a singular demostrative pronoun

You telling the truth is ..

You >> your â telling is a gerund, gerunds are used like nouns. We need a possessive pronoun

The bakery depends on meal beeing delivered without delay

Meal >> mealÂ´s â beeing is a gerund, and meal refers to this gerund. We need to use a genitive form with âÂ´sâ

Re: Bilingual

Cool Breeze — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:06:07 GMT

Anonymous
Websters is more of a descriptive dictionary. Cambridge and Oxford are prescriptive. I think that explains why Webster's has it as a noun. As our language evolves (becomes degraded), the more we'll find things in Websters that aren't widesly accepted by grammarians.

I agree with your analysis regarding the character of the two dictionaries. If change equal degradation, English was ruined hundreds of years ago. There are countless examples of that: the use of the auxiliary do in questions and negations, the use of s as a nearly universal plural ending, the use of which and who as relative pronouns etc. Also, more than 99 percent of modern English spellings are incorrect compared with what they were 1200 years ago. The language is completely corrupt if we accept the premise that change equals degradation.

The funny thing is that most people don't consider past changes bad, only those that happen in their lifetime. I fail to understand the logic behind that reasoning.

Re: Proficiency alongside "poverty".

Cool Breeze — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:58:49 GMT

Anonymous
In that respect, I would like to know when and how the auxiliary "do" appeared in English. What kind of people introduced it into the English language?
I would like to know who decided about the value of tenses of the Past. They do not correspond to the value of the tenses of the Past in latinoÃ¯d languages. Who can give me answers ?
In this debate, I do not think there is an evolution towards simplicity nor towards more complicated structures. The
communities of native speakers of a language constantly change the rules and the meaning of words (although the main core remains more or less stable for facility reasons.)
Ethnic languages are tools of inclusion and mainly exclusion (internal and external). That is why there are so many exceptions.
No ethnic language is that easy to learn. When I say "to learn" I mean to learn it to be on equal footing with a native speaker of the language. There will always be a difference, a discrimination.
From what I have experienced ( I am very interested by languages), there is no easy language. All has been done by training.
There is no natural language : everything has been constructed by Man.
I invite the readers to learn an interlanguage such as Esperanto, compare it with your mother tongue and with languages you have studied later. 90% to 95% of the time is spent to the learning of exceptions. That is why a language without exception such as Esperanto is ten to twenty times faster to learn than ethnic languages.
It is fascinating to see how a universal congress of Esperanto works and to compare it with an international congress in only one language. Many prejudices fall.
Maybe I am opening new interests in the debate..
George/Belgium

Do existed in Old English more than a thousand years ago as a regular verb and meant to cause. It is impossible to say who introduced it to English. It's use as an auxiliary in questions and negations was established in Shakespeare's day when it was correct to say both

I know not him
and
I do not know him.

It is very common that the usage of tenses varies from language to language, especially if the languages are not closely related. No reasons can usually be given for this. You might just as well ask why the usage of tenses in the Romance languages differs from that in English. Linguistic changes are often shrouded in the past and there is no knowing why they occurred.

All words and grammatical structures people are not used to sound wrong and/or odd and therefore people usually object to changes that are about to happen in their lifetime and think the language is deteriorating. This is true about all languages, not just English. People tend to think a language is at its most beautiful right now and any change will just make it worse.

English grammar has become so simple over the centuries that I cannot envisage it becoming any simpler without the risk of English becoming even more inexact than it is now. However, not all changes have made the language simpler in structure. In Old English there was just one relative pronoun and it had only one form. That made communication with relative clauses very awkward and it wasn't a great surprise that who, whom, whose, what and which began to be used as relatives to facilitate communication.

CB

Re: None for me. / Not for me.

Marius Hancu — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:34:50 GMT

1. None for me. The negation is in the pronoun. You negate (wanting) the object.

2. Not for me. The negation is in the verb. You negate the action of giving the object to you.

Re: Proficiency alongside "poverty".

Cool Breeze — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:49:45 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:
It interests me that some modern languages have at least the appearance of greater simplicity (e.g. the loss of inflection) than their counterparts of 900 years ago. This seems counter-intuitive: you would expect a language to evolve towards (not from) complexity.

Hello MrP

As far as English is concerned, the loss of inflections is largely due to massive foreign influence that lasted for centuries. Even native speakers of English began to drop inflections that could be dispensed with when they heard nonnatives use these uninflected forms. Learning a foreign word is always easier than learning to use it grammatically. Many Italian men know little about Finnish grammar but when they say I love you in broken Finnish to a fair-haired Finnish woman, she understands immediately.

If a language can't fulfil its needs, it will grow more complicated with time. That has happened to English as well. There was only one relative pronoun in Old English - and it was uninflected - and that clearly wasn't enough for seamless communication. Therefore people began using which, who and what as relative pronouns in addition to the original that. This way a handy genitive (whose) appeared. Unfortunately it is considered stilted by many in some contexts despite its neatness.

Another development, this time inexplicable and totally useless, towards complexity was the appearance of the auxiliary do in questions and negations. In Shakespeare's day it was possible to say Know you him? or Do you know him? and the modern usage became the norm after his death. As there is nothing similar in other Germanic languages, learning to use do correctly is a minor hindrance to learners in the early stages of language acquisition.

Cheers
CB

Re: I'm anxious that nobody should be hurt.

Marius Hancu — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:14:17 GMT

It's fine.

What do you suggest instead?

It means, in rough indicatives (which isn't the same, but just to talk about the pronoun and the situation):

I do not want that someone/somebody is/becomes hurt.

Using the correct subjunctive:

I do not want that someone/somebody be hurt.

You can use only a negation in English, thus nobody.
The author choses to negate in the pronoun, not in the verb, here.

Re: place of NOT in questions???

CalifJim — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:56:38 GMT

Speaking only of modern spoken English, the negation in questions can only appear before the subject if it is in contracted form (n't). Whether the subject is a noun or a pronoun is irrelevant.

CJ

Re: As much as

PASTEL — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 09:17:48 GMT

Dear Mirium,

I'm sorry for that breathless post. Are you any better now? Have you caught some Z's? You didn't misunderstand my question at all, this is what I need. I understand the meanings of this ambiguous sentence, and I was trying to analysize it from a grammatical point of view. I'm looking for your positive confirm, or some correction that might cause ant misunderstanding.

Compare these two,

1. I don't like him as much as you.
2. He doesn't like her as much as us.

I've noticed that you mentioned 'you' is viewed as an object pronoun on the condition that the previous 'as' functions as a preposition. Right? So, #1 and #2 are both correct.

Compare these two,

1. I don't like him as much as you.
2. He doesn't like her as much as we.

If 'you' is considered as a nominative(subject), "as...as" functions as compound conjection here, however, #2 is obvious incorrect. In #2, an auxiliary 'do' cannot be omitted, whereas in #1, an auxiliary is allow to go away. This is one of inconsistency I have to accept.

I don't like him as much as you do.

>
I have another question about your idea here. If I follow your idea, then I will think up another sentence that goes like "I like him as much as you do." In this sentence, obviously it delivers an affirmative idea,
"I like him."
"You like him."
Both of us like him.

Back to our original sentence, there is a nagative auxiliary that makes me relate its function to form a negation of the main verb 'like', therefore, I think of "dislike".
"I dislike him."
"You dislike him."
Both of us dislike him but you dislike him more than I do.
( Can you feel my headache now? ;>_

Compare these two,

1. I don't like him as much as you do.
2. I like him as much as you do.

You'd say #1 would be affirmative rather than negative. I'd say it would be the same as in #2. Since they could convey affirmative feeling (both you and I like him.) it must be the negative "not" that annoys me.

In #1, where is the scope of negation? I think the negative 'not' describes 'much' in stead of 'like', doesn't it?

Mirium, I appreciated of all the elaboraed details you've contributed to this subject. Again, thanks for understanding my questions and I look forward to your further comment.

Yours,
PASTEL.

Re: As much as

miriam — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 05:31:06 GMT

Pastel, I have a headache already! ~L~
Let's go step by step

I agree with what you said about the first pair of sentences (me/I do).

Your other example, "I don't like him as much as you" can certainly be ambiguous; the two interpretations you posted are possible.

I agree with your analysis of 2-a.
I'd say, however, that the two sentences would be affirmative rather than negative:
"I like him."
"You like him."

Now, 2-b is the sentence that may be ambiguous, as I've just said.
The personal pronoun "you" has that same form as subject and object. 'You' and 'it' and the only two personal pronouns that have the same form as subject and object; the other pronouns change. Anyway, since you don't have an auxiliary very accompanying "you", you are right to say that the objective form is used. But, be careful; the fact that an objective form is used in this type of sentence depends only on the fact that "as" is a preposition, so when it is followed by a pronoun, it will be an objective pronoun. You can choose between that and a finite clause such as "You do". This example will probably be more clear with other pronouns (those who have different subject and object forms).
"I don't like him as much as you" can mean either that you like him more than I do or that I like you more than I like him.

"He doesn't like her as much as we" sounds weird to you because it is not grammatically correct.
"He doesn't like her as much as us" and "He doesn't like her as much as we do", on the other hand, are correct.
The meaning of "He doesn't like her as much as we do" is clear: we like her more than he does.
The meaning of "He doesn't like her as much as us" is, again, ambiguous. The two possible interpretations are "we like her more than he does", as in the previous example, or "he likes us more than he likes her".

I'm not sure what you mean by the "transformation" part of your post. but let's give that a try as well.

Step 1- "I don't like him as much as you don't like him."
I would avoid that construction if I were you! It isn't correct.

Step 2- "I don't like him as much as you like him."
This sentence is correct, but it can be improved to avoid redundancy.

Step 3- "I don't like him as much as you do."
This is perfect, but it does not mean what you think. The mening of this sentence is the sentence in step #2.
- We both like him, but you like him more than I do.
- We both like him, but I like him less than you do.
- We both like him, but I don't like him so/as much as you do.

The three sentences have the same meaning. In your example, the negation applies only to the first main verb, the verb whose subject is "I".

One more thing:
"I don't like him as much as you do" and "I dislike him as much as you do" have different meanings.

I'm not sure this is what you were looking for. If I misunderstod your question, let me know?

Miriam

As much as

PASTEL — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 17:39:52 GMT

I don't like him as much as you.

Dear Mirium, here is my analysis.

1-a. She doesn't sing as well as me.
1-b. She doesn't sing as well as I do.

In 1-a, an object pronoun is used after 'as', according to Michael Swan, this is an informal style, whereas in 1-b, subject+verb is used after 'as', it is more formal.

As you can see, in your example #2
#2. I don't like him as much as you.
2-a. I don't like him as much as you do. ( 'you' is a subject)
2-b. I don't like him as much as you. ('you' is an object pronoun)

2-a and 2-b are possible variants of #2. Have you noticed that we have a subject 'you' and an object 'you'?

In 2-a, both of us like him, but I like him less and you like him more. Ambuguity is cleared out in 2-a because 'you' is a subject.
What are the two equal things you compare now?
1. I don't like him. (subject)
2. You don't like him. (subject)
You are comparing who likes him more, You or I ?

In 2-b, I don't think it's usual to regard 'you' as a subject. For example, He doesn't like her as much as we. (Sounds weird to my ears). You either say 'He doesn't like her as much as we do or he doesn't like her as much us. So I don't think 2-b is that ambiguous. (It could be.) So 2-b means I don't like him as much as I don't like you.
What are the two equal things you compare now?
1. I don't like him. (object)
2. I don't like you, either. (object)
It's the object of the main verb that is compared. In other words, I dislike him more, and I dislike you less.

Transformation
Step 1
I don't like him as much as you don't like him.
==> I think this sentence is gramatically strange. 'As + Adj/Adv + as' is used to compare two equal things. Here in the sentence, you compare the feeling of 'dislike him'.

Step 2
I don't [like him as much as you like him.]
==>'don't' negates the idea in my brackets. Is the negation scope here?

Step 3
Then, I'd apply 'pro-verb' substitution to the latter 'like him', and then it generates a new variants,
I don't [like him as much as you do.]

So the latter 'like him' is within negation scope.

What do you think, Mirium?