In Present tenses^x, Articles^x, Tenses^x

3a) A cat ate the small animal. 3b) A cat is a small animal. The syntactic analyses of the two sentences are differents. In the sentence 3a) we have (s, v, do) while, in the second sentence 3b) we have (s, v (copular), sP). In 3a) “a cat “is noun phrase (a is determiner...

The way this was explained to me, many years ago, is that a movie (or book) is always in the present tense. If you watch the movie it's happening now, it you read the book it's happening now. Therefore the use of present tense in reviews.

Thanks, CJ and all.I also saw many articles in Wikipedia that are talking about the synopsis of movies. They use present tense as well. Are they the same reason? Breathless immediacy? Ench

Hi,I don't understand why it has to be in present tense for the subordinate clause in the reported speech content. I saw this from YAHOO NEWS today. The title of the article is "US re-examines Afghan civilian deaths from attack," and it is by JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press...

Hi all!I've been giving English conversation lessons to a theology professor for about a year now. He's getting on in the years - a couple years from retirement - and his primary goal has been just to get his spoken English going a little stronger. His mother tongue is French but he's...

Suppose there is complete darkness and there are no dust or water particles in the air. A laser beam passing in front of a man would not be visible to him because there is nothing in the air to reflect light to his eyes.When the sun has completely set, there will still be some light. Please have...

I find it difficult to park a/the car along a/the kerb.I found it difficult to park a/the car along a/the kerb.Suppose I found this to be the case some time ago and I still find this to hold true, what should I say? Should I use the present tense or the past tense? Also, could you please tell me...

Just to clarify about the indefinite article: it's OK to say "stores and restaurants see sharp decline in sales" without the article when using the present tense; in fact it has the ring of a newspaper headline. On the other hand when using the gerund not using the article in this...

Hi, It depends on the context, but I think that in most cases you'd use #1. Your grammar is also a little awkward. The definite article suggests that you are talking about a specific policeman. The present tense suggests that you are describing his habits/routine. That all seems like...

Hello, mr. Micawber Looks like I have to provide some further explanations. In a traditional text adventure the player enters text commands which are parsed/interpreted by the game's engine, and gets the result in the form a textual description. In the example above the commands were marked...