Search results for 'tag:Sentence structures tag:Idioms' matching tags 'Sentence structures' and 'Idioms'

"I merely claim to be..."

MarvinTheMartian — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:30:01 GMT

Consider the following dialogue:

Person #1: "You're crazy!"

Person #2: "I'm not crazy. I merely claim to be Napoleon come back from the grave."

After doing a Google search for "I merely claim to be", I was surprised to find that the phrase is not nearly as common as I had thought. Strange, it sounds perfectly natural to me in this context. Is is unidiomatic? If so, can you suggest a different way of saying it that would also underline the irony of the above statement?

P.S.: Can you let me know if you spot any mistakes in my message not necessarily related to the question? I seem to be "verbally impaired" at the moment...

take his mutton

femmy — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:20:21 GMT

Hi everyone,

I'm new here. I hope I can learn much from this forum. I'm currently reading the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (has anyone here read this?), and I find many phrases and idioms and sentence structures that I'm not familiar with. I hope it's okay if I post here whenever I come across one of these.

The first one I want to ask here is the phrase "take his mutton". Is this an idiom or is it intended as a literal phrase? Here are some sample sentences:

"Oh, yes!" said Mr Drawlight. "The Glasshouse-street boiling-cellar is where Davey and Lucas occasionally take their mutton, as I dare say you know."
On days when Mr Norrell did not dine abroad Mr Drawlight took his mutton at Mr Norrell's house in Hanover-square.

Thanks!

Re: hello

Samarnh_p — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 05:15:04 GMT

Writing is a tough job, but once you like it you never fail to success. There are bunches of good web addresses that may guide you to be an excellent writer or composer. You can make things alive, so you also can make it good and shiny. I recommend that each time you've done with your writing whether just a word, a sentence, a paragraph, or an essay, it's your responsibility to revise it again and again until you feel enough. Surely, no one can make a perfect paper, unless it's polished and critized. Always be ware with unity, style, sentence structure, spelling, and word choices. Writing is formal; thus, slangs or idioms are not included.

Good luck with your study Littl...

Re: Please correct my composition, thanks!

Yousan — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:33:05 GMT

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Your essay is clear in general. Yet you have to be careful about some points.>>

First, try to paraphrase what you want to say if it's given by the topic. Don't use the exact wordings.>>

It's good for you to have used different sentence structures in the essay. But please mind the use of complex sentences.>>

The fact that mainland students are working so hard that they put a lot of effort into studying in order to pursue a better job in the future, the places in local universities are inevitably taken by some of them.>>

In the above sentence, the subject is "the fact". The sentence pattern should be like "The fact that..........is/does/etc......" So you'd better write two independent sentences or joint the two sentences by a conjunction. >>Like "As pursuing a place in universities is no longer an easy work. The sixth form students should work hard in future." Because "as" is a conjunction showing the "cause and result" of the two clauses, a comma instead of a period should be placed between them to make the sentence like "As pursuing a place in a university is no longer an easy task, the sixth formers should work hard to get prepared for it."

If this is an essay for HKCEE or HKALE, use of idioms/proverbs like "every coin has two sides" is prohibited.

Use "unable to" instead of "cannot" after "make sb/sth".>>

And the last paragraph can be safely deleted as the essay question asks you to end with the paragraph talking about the six formers.>>

Hope the above comments help.>>

Re: Question on Foot of English Metric Poetry

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 13:07:26 GMT

(Mr M forgot to log in again!-- MM)

It is a matter of natural sentence flow and stress for meaning. Let's write it like a prose sentence:

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.

Spoken in conversation, sentences carry several levels of stress, not just stressed and unstressed. This sentence would probably be uttered with primary (main) stress on poem and tree-- these are the core words of meaning here-- and with secondary stress on lovely-- this adjective essentially defines the relationship between poem and tree. Below that would be tertiary stress on the simple subject (I), the simple predicate (see) and the negative word (never)-- notice that all of these stresses appear in the dependent clause, not in the matrix clause (I think), which only colours the core statement about poems and trees. (I should include a caveat that others may find differing stress patterns, and different intent would also produce others)

Trees is written in iambics, which as you probably know is a common rhythm of spoken English. To a certain extent, we tend to talk that way, and iambic stress patterns will impose themselves on our utterances. It is probably a circular phenomenon, actually-- we tend to speak in iambics, and so sentence structure and patterns of idioms and stock phrases are therefore formed and preserved in iambics.

Blank verse is iambic; it just does not rhyme. I think you mean free verse. Free verse depends on rhythms set, not by syllables, but by the cadence of phrases, images, and syntax. It should be relatively easy for you to learn to feel the difference if you recite aloud (as you should all poetry) this excerpt from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

And compare it with some of Thomas Grey's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Now, which one is free verse, and which is in metric verse?

Re: As you go..

vince — Fri, 13 May 2005 08:00:10 GMT

It implies a process of doing something.

e.g.
You have to look up 100 new words you don't know. You spread this over a month, while you also learn things about grammar, sentence structure, idioms, proverbs, etc. You learn 100 new words as you learn English. You do it as you go.

Re: How would you define "native speaker of english"

aeon — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 03:35:47 GMT

Many Singaporeans do speak very good English, but the reason many western native English speakers don't consider that Singaporeans in general speak 'native English' is because of the predominance of the Singlish dialect.

Singlish in it's most extreme forms lacks inflection for tense and plural forms, the verb 'to be' is optional, particles and sentence structures borrowed from Chinese (usually Hokkien) are used, and local idioms which are not comprehensible to western English speakers are used frequently. Many Singlish speakers are incapable of speaking standard English, and are thus incomprehensible to someone who hasn't spent time there getting used to the dialect.

That said, many native speakers in the UK, Oz and the US speak dialects which are very non-standard too. Perhaps rather than quibbling over what constitutes a native speaker, the real test should be whether someone can speak and write English which is widely comprehensible? In which case many Cockneys, Scousers, Outback Aussies, Gangsta Rappers and Singlish speakers would fail the test, but a large number of English speakers who would consider even themselves to be non-native would pass with flying colours...

Re: What's the logic behind this?

paco2004 — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:40:32 GMT

Hello MrP

So I can only assume that either Dickens got his idiom slightly wrong, or âChild as he wasâ had a simple complementary sense in his day.

I feel your sense that children are not immune to hunger and misery is very modern one. Children of poor social classes in Dickens' times would be put in misery and they were exposed to hunger more intensely than adults. I think "who earns least should eat least" was the rule among poor families in pre-modern societies. Indeed in my childhood I was told this rule quite often by my father. So I take Dickens's 'child as he was' as a concessive clause to mean 'though he was a child'. I think this would be supported by Dickens' uses of [N as SV] construct in his other novel "Nicholas Nickleby";
"It might have been that Sir Mulberry remembered, that, knave and usurer as he was, he must, in some early time of infancy, have twined his arm about her father's neck." (Dickens; Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 38)
"The waiter was touched. Waiter as he was, he had human passions and feelings, and he looked very hard at Miss Squeers as he handed the muffins." (Dickens; Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 39)

Also, it occurs to me that âfrontingâ of the noun is common in e.g. early alliterative poetry in Germanic languages. So we would have to go a long way back to find evidence of ellipses. And I suppose you couldn't 'front', if you included the article...and there's nowhere else to put it...

I tried to look for the origin of this kind of usage in OED but it was a vain work. But as you know well, historically speaking, the English language had not indefinite articles at least at the time of Old English in which people could discriminate singular and plural by the noun's declensional form. So they said the way like "MrP is good man" (MrP iss god mon). Noun declension systems being degenerated, use of "a/an" gradually got popular and the sentence structure had been changed into the one like "MrP is a good man". But still now you would often use a singular countable noun without articles especially when you talk about person's quality or profession. For example: "Ms Condoleezza Rice is more scholar than politician". So I don't think it is curious the noun in [N as SV] constructs does not take an indefinite article. Another reason people disincline to put "a/an" to the noun in [N as SV] constructs might be that "a/an" cannot be stressed so much in narration. I think the construct [N as S V] is used not only as concession but also as to emphasize the fronted word and the word should be stressed. So it would be quite inconvenient for emphasis if the noun is headed by weakly pronounced a or an. This is my humble opinion and it has no firm grounds.

paco

Re: Buisness english and general english

anon1 — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 05:32:39 GMT

This is a very open question.

General English

-informal
-may contain idioms, colloquial, and slang phrases and sentences
-not always spoken and written (e-mail) in complete sentences

Business English

-precise, often legalistic language is used that is difficult to understand
-more complex sentence structure
-language (words and phrases) specific to the industry are commonly used
-many abbreviations and acronymns are used
-often formal language is used, and words are carefully chosen--especially in contracts

Is there something specific you were looking for?