Search results for 'tag:Prepositions tag:Analogies' matching tags 'Prepositions' and 'Analogies'

Re: In according to?

Goodman — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:42:01 GMT

Schetin,

I am still trying to dial to the right frequency so that we can communicate. I am afraid I have failed because I realize we are not talking in the same wave length. I find your pattern of thought difficult to understand. I once heard this analogy "there is only a thin line between a moron and a wiz". I surely can't tell which one are you. You at times sounded smart but when listened carefully, the words coming out of your mouth proved otherwise. I think you like to talk in riddles to confuse people.

Would you care to elaborate? <<<Since Americans started their expansion by means of language, the rule "but don't ask me why" has become nearly universal. >>>

<<<There's a rule and it can be explained. That one thinks an expression sounds fine doesn't mean it is correct. I have explained why expression "in according" can't have preposition "to" - because it requires a direct object. Because the verb "accord" is transitive. ( I don't know what brand of English you are studying in Russia. In my 20 years of learning, I've never come across this explanation, Sorry!)You can't just accord, you have to accord [TO] something.

Accordance is a noun and can be used with preposition "with", "on", "of", about, whatever. (Wow! this is new to me)

It's not a matter of lexis - it's grammar.>>> (Really !!)

Re: taking notes, grammar question

Chariot — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:46:59 GMT

Thank you all for your opinions. Having read your posts, can I say that

1. present participle used in the way as it is in "He is the student taking notes" exclusively refers to the action that is going on at the moment of speaking. If a sentence can be used to describe the action, it should be 'He is taking notes.' Past actions or future actions that modify "the student" should be written as relative clauses;

in "He is the student who is taking notes", is the relative clause "who is taking notes" redundant, since the present participle represent the action that is happening now?

2. by the same analogy, "She is the woman with black hair" and "She is the woman having black hair" are different in meaning. "Having black hair" is a temporary state;

3. on an occasion on which the woman is the only person who has black hair, "She is the woman with the black hair" is correct because "the black hair" is unique among the group of people. If "black hair" mentioned as a characteristic of the woman, not as something that distinguishes her from the other people, "She is the woman with black hair" is correct;

4. sometimes a participle, a relative clause or a preposition phrase can be used interchangeably to carry the same meaning?

Thank you for your attention.

Re: The Seven Deadly Sins of Grammar

Alienvoord — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 18:40:11 GMT

I'd disagree with all of them.

1) There's nothing wrong with "I like to run and play." It's perfectly comprehensible.

2) Splitting the infinitive can change the meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive
"to go boldly where no man has gone before" or "boldly to go where no man has gone before." However, these two rephrasings do not have identical meanings â the former attaches the boldness to the manner of going, while the latter attaches the boldness to the complete act of going "where no man has gone before."

3) This is silly. If I say "I only want to go to the movies" I'm implying that I don't want to breathe?

4) Sure, it in "it is nice" refers to nothing out of context, but how often does that happen in conversation? Also "it" can be used as a dummy subject, because English always requires a subject, as in "It is nice to see you today."

5) This is wrong for the same reason as 4: context is your friend.

6) This prescription was created in the 18th century by analogy with Latin. People had been ending sentences with prepositions long before then.

7) You haven't given any evidence as to why the passive voice, a normal grammatical formation in English, is wrong or unacceptable.

Re: Three Questions: All Plural Possession

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:26:47 GMT

In terms of grammatical correctness, it is essential to keep in mind whether the pronoun in question should be subjective or objective. One says "My wife and I own this tree" because in this case one ("I") is the subject of the verb. One uses "me" when he or she is the object: "My wife owns me." Not only verbs take objective forms of pronouns; prepositions in English also do so. For example, "My brain is fried" can be restated as "The brain of me (not I) is fried." Consequently, Ryan Smith's posting "If the form "...the Christmas tree belonging to my wife and I." is valid, then why use "me and my wife's"? " is a good question, except that "the Christmas tree belonging to my wife and I" is not valid. It should read "the Christmas tree belonging to me (and whomever else with whom I choose to associate, be it my wife or a killer gerbil.)" When it comes to possessive pronouns, considerations of objectiveness and subjectiveness are no longer relevant. What is relevant is that "my" is acting as an adjective here. One would not say "me tree" unless one was a pirate. This is because "me" is a pronoun and "tree" is a noun: in normal English it makes little sense to write two consecutive words functioning as nouns ("zebra I" or "dictionary iceberg"). "My tree" is clearly correct. The redundancy of "my and my wife's tree" is obvious irksome to the ear. While correct, the proposed form "the tree of my wife and me" (or better yet, "the tree of me and my wife") sound better to me. Keep in mind that ". . . of me and my wife" is correct, and not "of I", because the preposition "of" requires an objective pronoun, not a subjective pronoun such as I and we. With regards to Moijelesuis's comments, me is how I refer to myself, but note that "I" refer to "me" (or myself, to emphasize the reflexivity of the situation.) "Me and my wife's house - the house belonging to us, me and my wife" is not a correct analogy. The house belonging to me requires a pronoun, so "us, me and my wife" is correct. My wife's (and the first person's in some form) house should read "my", because my is an adjective describing house, not a noun compounded to the house. Happy grammatical adventures, all!

Re: Earlier/before

CalifJim — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 23:14:36 GMT

I have the same reaction as you do, Taka. "earlier" has the implicit comparison "earlier than you actually did"; "before" does not. "before" leaves me asking "before what?"

Changing to "later /"after":

I have no time to do it now; I'll do it later. (later than now)
I have no time to do it now; I'll do it after. (after what???)

The spatial analogy might be:

If you had gone closer, you would have seen it.
If you had gone near, you would have seen it.

In the first, the comparative form in "er" invites "closer to it than you actually did", whereas in the second, "near" only invites the question "near what?".

In all these cases the non-comparative forms act like prepositions which are missing their (required, apparently!) objects.

ps "after" looks suspiciously like it was originally "more aft" in the early history of English, but no one nowadays conceives of it as a comparative form.

Review of The Grouchy Grammarian by Thomas Parrish

John C. — Sat, 29 Nov 2003 08:55:41 GMT

This book looked promising â it was subtitled A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should Know Better â and in the first few pages I came across a passage referring to that group:

What did these people study in high school and college? Headline writing? Advertising techniques? No English, no history? Have they never loved words and ideas, the way a carpenter loves wood or a chef loves herbs? Didn't they want to know subjects and verbs, adverbs and prepositions, as the carpenter knows nails and sandpaper and hot glue? Have they never taken a sentence apart to see what made it run?

Good stuff. He had me very much on his side right at the start.

However, I wasn't much further into the book before I realised it was actually full of unsupported assertions that even a beginning grammarian like me could see were dubious.

Pettiness arises early in the piece. The author takes exception to a Hong Kong jeweller being quoted by a journalist as saying that, "he had dreamed all his life to have enough money to â¦". Of course the "to have" should be "of having", but what's his point? That people who live in Hong Kong don't always speak perfect English? Some news flash. Or perhaps he feels that journalists ought to rework direct quotes to improve the grammar â thereby having their interviewees speaking better than they actually did. Few native English speakers would utter a sentence like that, and certainly none who would be in the target audience for the book.

Even when he's making a valid and important point, instead of giving a few representative examples, he hammers away with case after case after case until the reader becomes exasperated: "Yes, yes! I get it, for heaven's sake â move on!"

For instance, subject-verb agreement, an easy point to demonstrate, is given fourteen examples, before he writes, "At this point, I felt I had probably chosen enough examples of subject-verb disagreement to make the point clear." But then, at the urging of the grumpy grammarian, he goes on to cite another twenty-two (!) examples that add nothing whatever to the argument. This kind of spoon-feeding is counter-productive. The informed reader has long since become bored, and the novice is misled into believing there's something diabolically subtle about the concept.

Two important issues were mishandled: Firstly, the difference between may and might, and secondly, the lie/lay problem. In both instances I finished the chapter a bit less clear in my own mind than at the start, although the issues are not actually that hard to explain. A few minutes browsing much shorter passages in my other reference works restored my clarity.

Then there were the places where the author had pointed out a common mistake, and pretended to be astonished that people could be so idiotic as to make it, when the error was in fact quite understandable. For instance, he gets all bent out of shape about people using lead instead of led as the past tense of lead, when it's obvious that people are unconsciously working on the analogy of read/read. English is tricky; sometimes you engender more goodwill by acknowledging that fact instead of battering people around the head for trivial slips.

The book lacks an underlying philosophy. Sometimes the author strains to be liberal, but at other times he's pedantic on minor points; the overall impression is of a grab-bag of personal prejudices rather than a coherent view of English usage.

Another problem I had was with the presentation. The device he uses is that he has a friend (the grouchy grammarian of the title), whose clippings he mines for examples of egregious errors. But the method quickly becomes tiresome and artificial, and the grouch is poorly characterised â he's pretty much an empty clichÃ© of a grump (e.g. he says "humph!" a lot). At no time was I able to believe or pretend that the grouchy grammarian was anyone other than the author.

The last problem I have with the book, and I admit that this may be specific to me, is that there's a great deal of sports talk â mostly about baseball and American football. The author is clearly a fan of these two sports, so many of the solecisms he cites are from TV or newspaper sports commentators. For this non-American, non-sporting reader, that made much of the content foggy and incomprehensible.

To be fair, there is much of interest, and even a few gems, in the book, but if you purport to write about correctness in language then you have make sure that everything you write is actually correct. I don't mind people putting forward suggestions or opinions about usage, but when these are clearly debatable, yet presented as incontrovertible facts, the integrity of the whole enterprise is thrown into doubt.

Fortunately, I got this book out of the library; I would have been very disappointed if I had paid good money for it. I'll photocopy a few pages when I take it back, but I won't be sorry to drop it in the returns slot after that.