I think the point is that an 'absolute' construction modifies the whole sentence, whereas a participle construction modifies the subject. Thus: Dinner being ready, we all went downstairs - Absolute construction (we didn't necessarily

Do you often hear people talking like this? I don't. Once in a great while maybe. But I do see it fairly often in literature -- Dickens, Hardy, or Melville, perhaps. Sometimes they even leave out the participle! The dinner ready, everyone sat

Hi, Eddie, thanks for catching my "it's." I make that error about 60% of the time and catch it on re-read about 90% of the time. I think A. Stars answered you well on "That is he." There are two issues: the grammar issue,

I have always heard in conversation - that must be him / her on the phone. Of course we say:He is on the phone now. Grammatically, "that must be him" it is not strictly correct, since the case of a pronoun after "be" is

[Do you mean opinion different from one person to the next, or "one grammar book" to the next? Language is constantly changing - especially English. Grammarians disagree constantly, as Huevos has said. Consider the expression,

if the verb is only implied use the objective pronoun, and if the verb is present use the nominative.In your sentence the verb is implied. Huevo, could you be kind enough to expound on that, even now I don't think I have a clear and

By the way, what is 'DUH"? Is it an abbreviation for a phrase? Hi, You might want lo listen to this mp3 file from BBC Learning English (warning: nearly 600kb). Although it focuses on " do'h " ( "I'm stupid!",

This problem of the subject complement is an ongoing debate. It caused because nouns in English don't differenciate between subjective and objective. Only English pronouns do that. In everyday speech and writing the pronouns used in this

Find out if your book and your teacher expect the highly formal versions (now old-fashioned, but still encouraged in some grammar books), or the less formal, more modern versions. Once you know that you can answer "correctly" more often!

Yes, it is. This is otherwise referred to in grammar as ABSOLUTE CONSTRUCTION. By definition, it is a reduced adjective or adverb clause that functions as sentence modifier indicating time and causality. This type of construction is commonly used