Search results for 'tag:Regards tag:Inflections' matching tags 'Regards' and 'Inflections'

Re: adjective or adverb ? - by N88 -

Nokia88 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:30:04 GMT

Cool Breeze
Nokia88

The axe will fall the heaviest in its financial services division, which includes banking, wealth management and insurance operations.

The heaviest = adjective or adverb?

An interesting point, Nokia! In some languages, including my mother tongue, both an adjective and an adverb could be used in your sentence - and they would be different in form. Comparison is a vague and inexact form of art in English. Logic says that it makes no actual difference whether we consider the heaviest an adjective or an adverb. Its grammatical form suggests that it is an adjective. Heavy is a disyllabic adjective ending in y, and adverbs are formed by using the ly inflection from such adjectives. Examples:

(A): It rained heavily today. It rained even more heavily yesterday. It rained [the] most heavily last week.

(B): Heavier and heaviest are adjectives: My brother is heavier than me/I. He is the heaviest man I know.

CB

Dear Cool Breeze,
I am sorry!
I didn't know what had happened to me that day when I was reading your perfect post. I must have been over tired that I comprehended the two sets of examples just opposite.
The first set you wrote:
(A): It rained heavily today. It rained even more heavily yesterday. It rained [the] most heavily last week (adverb modifies verb).
(A): I misunderstood it as (adjective modifies noun).
The second set you wrote:
(B): Heavier and heaviest are adjectives: My brother is heavier than me/I. He is the heaviest man I know (adjective modifies noun).
(B): I misunderstood it as (adverb modifies verb).

Great Post!
Thank you very much!
Best regards, Nokia88

Re: gerund or verbal noun with an article?

Cool Breeze — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:32:42 GMT

Anonymous

Why do you think RayH seemed to have said this has to be "the fearful wailing"?

1)He heard a fearful wailing of a dog

I think he said it has to be:
2)He heard the fearful wailing of a dog

I think RayH is correct but I also think no. 1 can be correct under a right situation. I think it would have been better if the sentence had a plural noun after "of" like this:
He heard a fearful wailing of dogs

You'll have to wait for RayH's explanation for his preferences. He heard a fearful wailing of a dog is fine grammatically but it does suggest that you may hear different kinds of wailings of a dog and therefore the sentence may sound odd to some. The plural dogs simply indicates that there were at least two dogs, nothing else. No grammatical difference, really.

Grammatical terms cause confusion even among experts, so you have nothing to worry about! This is because not all grammarians and usage experts use them in the same way. There are people who don't use the term "verbal noun" at all. They regard what I consider a verbal noun as a gerund. Examples:

The speaking of English is easy. (A verbal noun and because speaking is a noun, the is posible before it. Even an adjectival attribute can be used: The correct speaking of English is easy.)

Speaking English is easy. (A gerund, which to my mind is neither a verb nor a noun but a little bit of both. The is not possible before a gerund, nor is an adjectival attribute and these two things are a clear sign (to me) that a gerund is not a noun: Correct speaking English is easy. (WRONG!!!)

Because there are hardly any inflections in English, there is bound to be occasional confusion as to the exact meaning of every word ending in ing as your example (beginning) in another post shows.

I can't remember what I have written about these things before but if you are interested, you may wish to read these posts that deal with the gerund, verbal nouns and participles and their differences:

subject of gerund gerund v present participle gerund v verbal noun

Re: some/a few; regarding/regarding to

Avangi — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:15:01 GMT

Anonymous wrote:

What is different between "some" and "a few" when referring to countable nouns? Nothing.  Both mean "a small number of", although only "few" = "small" by definition. (some can be used for both countable & uncountable   -   I guess you knew that!)

e.g. I have stopped taking the pills for some days./ I have stopped taking the pills for a few days. In this example, voice inflection could be used to make some a bit more than a few.
Is there any other word carrying similar senses, both formal and informal, that we can use to make our writing and speaking more natural? I have several pills left. There is/are only a handful left. This is figurative. You can actually say, "There are only a handful of cars left in the lot." (Don't use is here   -   is makes it less figurative.)

How do you use "regarding" and "regarding to"? Any difference? haven't heard "regarding to"   maybe you've heard "according to" or "in regard to"

Thanks for your help.

Have you heard anything about/regarding/in regard to my job application?

According to the weather report, we're in for some snow.

Re: each

Aperisic — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 19:59:37 GMT

Inchoateknowledge wrote:
Hi,

Thank you for your detailed explanation.
The apple of each student.
Let us disregard verb inflection and concentrate on the deternminer before 'apples'
I used 'the' because I mean the twenty apples I have already referred too.
'The twenty apples' is what I want to paraphrase using 'each' and 'people' words.
Comments?

There are twenty seats and twenty covers. I have to fix a cover of/on each seat.

Apple that belongs to the students has no attribute to define it as unique, either you mentioned them before or not.

There are twenty apples in the basket. The twenty students in my room took the twenty apples. An apple of each student has to be eaten as fast as possible.

There are twenty tags with students' names in the basket. The twenty students in my room took the twenty tags. The tag of each student has to be colored in blue.

It is not what you said but whether each object is unique, different from all others on its own (unless, of course, you add an attribute that will make each of them unique).

Re: each

Inchoateknowledge — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:32:42 GMT

Hi,

Thank you for your detailed explanation.
The apple of each student.
Let us disregard verb inflection and concentrate on the deternminer before 'apples'
I used 'the' because I mean the twenty apples I have already referred too.
'The twenty apples' is what I want to paraphrase using 'each' and 'people' words.
Comments?

Re: Inferior dialects?

Randy_Tam — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:16:07 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:

What are we to make of the fact that adult native speakers often "self-prescriptivise"?

Example:

"Oh, hello, MrP. MissQ was just telling Randy and me â Randy and I â about L1 acquisition."

MrP

I read your question wrong... oops.

Um, I think that does not resemble 'self - prescriptivism' at all, at least according to my definition thereof. It is, nevertheless, an instance showing an L1 speaker having the tendency to correct himself of speech errors. That he generates a nominative, instead of accusative at the objective A - position (tell sbd, that 'sbd' is the 'Object') is inexplicable with UG, except with a more careful examination as to whether, when the speaker was acquiring the language, he was given sufficient evidence as to the fact that English has an explicit accusative 1st person form. If he was not, then he would treat that inflection as a covert one, resembling the invisible case system in Chinese. If I say 'I love him' in Chinese:

(i) ææä»

without regard to the grammaticality of the translation, the clause can be roughly translated as:

(i) I love he

in which the verb is constant (Chinese verbs do not have tense morphology) and the case is covert (ie. no inflectional morphology).

If he constantly generates a nominative at objective A - position, then he has already acquired the setting that English does not have morphological case for the singular 1st person pronoun. It does not, therefore, amount to prescriptivism, but actually the acquisition of a (perhaps new?) variant of English case morphology.

Re: About English plural 's'

Su Cheng Zhong — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:58:55 GMT

korin said:
>Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded leaving only 's' (plural nouns, 3rd person singular verbs, and saxon genitive) in modern English. English has become a rather analytic lg, where most of the syntactic relations within a sentence are expressed by means of word order.
I always confused by the 3rd person singular verbs. If some one like, can you explain the following sentence, for me?
"Jones shake(s) hand(s) with Tom."
The question is that how we calssify the subject and object, singular or plural? I always wonder that the shaking hand(s) is like the meaning of shaking a bar. For shaking hand(s) means that you wave your hand and cause other hand waving. So it should be 'Jones shakes Tom's hand', not 'Jones shakes hands with Tom'. For Jones' hand is initiative and Tom's hand is passive. If you regard both hand were shaken simultaneously, then, who are (is) subject? Are both Jones and Tom are subject? Then we have to say, 'Jones and Tom shake hands.'

Re: To whom/whom

paco2004 — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:31:56 GMT

Hi MrP

Yeah I agree to your view that the double objects construction had been established when case inflection was still retained English. I guess you are rather special in linguistic sense. I'm a little doubtful of common English speakers in the sense of differentiating objects into dative and accusative. In this regard I am interested in what way an English speaking child acquires the meaning of "Mom gave me this book" My guess is like this:"I wanted this book and mom gave me this book and now it is my book" I feel English speaking children first acquire the meaning of the double objects construction by the result that the book came to be under their possession.

paco

Re: Gentile

paco2004 — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 02:47:58 GMT

Hello MrP

Thanks for the reply. I am lucky I get an confirmation directly from a native speaker to that I had better not say "I'm a Japanese", though I feel somewhat like unhappiness in your way of discriminating the suffices "-an" and "-ese". By the way I feel the word "Japaneses" is much better than the word "Japanee", whose uses are still not a few (We can hit more than 5000 sites in Google where "Japanee" is used.

H.L. Mencken (1880â1956). The American Language. 1921.

6. The Noun

The only inflections of the noun remaining in English are those for number and for the genitive, and so it is in these two regions that the few variations to be noted in vulgar American occur. The rule that, in forming the plurals of compound nouns or noun-phrases, the -s shall be attached to the principal noun is commonly disregarded, and it goes at the end. Thus, âI have two sons-in-lawâ is never heard among the plain people; one always hears âI have two son-in-laws.â So with the genitive. I once overheard this: âthat umbrella is the young lady I go withâs.â Often a false singular is formed from a singular ending in s, the latter being mistaken for a plural. Chinee, Portugee and Japanee are familiar; I have also noted trapee, specie, 93 tactic and summon (from trapeze, species, tactics and summons). 94 Paradoxically, the word incidence is commonly misused for incident, as in âhe told an incidence.â Here incidence (or incident) seems to be regarded as a synonym, not for happening, but for story. I have never heard âhe told of an incidence.â The of is always omitted. The general disregard of number often shows itself when the noun is used as object. I have already quoted Lardnerâs âsome of the men has brung their wife alongâ; in a popular magazine I lately encountered âthose book ethnologistsâ¦ canât see what is before their nose.â Many similar examples might be brought forward.

By the way do you feel any differences in the sense among "Blairese", "Blairian" and "Blairish"?