By Word order, Constructions

Hi, At The American Heritage Book of English Usage at Bartleby.com in the section named "1. Grammar: Traditional Rules, Word Order, Agreement, and Case", I saw this line in its note: However, when a verb is negated by not or never, and is followed by a negative verb phrase (but not an...

As a native English speaker (well perhaps not entirely native, I was born in Russia and immigrated to the U.S. at the tender age of 7) I would have to say that apart from the obviously difficult aspects of the English language such as tenses, an unorthodox phonetic system employed in the language...

Hi Steve, Generally speaking, I have trouble understanding clearly what he is asking. I'll go through and try to make some comments. My advice is that you should focus your native speaker skills on ensuring that his sentences and paraphrases sound acceptable, and let him focus on his...

In this type of construction you will find a variety of correct phrasings when the subject of the clause is rather long and can be split logically into two or more parts. the price | to replace a bumper allows for the addition of will be in either of two places. the price will be | to...

Hi there. I think that your first publication is very very good. Where are you from? Where do you want to publish it? But some things seems suspicious, i meant using tenses and grammatical constructions. Do You know what? - use do is necessary, but in informal way of writing skipping is...

Oh, so it's just a changed word order? This surprises me even more than if it was a left out article! Where have English grammar rules gone to? Or is it a standard construction I am not aware of?

I'm an assistant language teacher in Japan and an English teacher often asks me some tough grammar questions. Here's two recent ones: 1.) In 1990, more than half the 501 different jobs you could have were jobs that weren't there in 1940. He asked about the usage of weren't there. I told him...

Neither is correct because you need another pronoun (or noun). Will you see what they will require from me? However, in terms of word order, "what they will" instead of "what will they" in this type of construction.

Hi guys, A In the process of writing them, they are reconnected with that which they have lost. B In the process of writing them, they are reconnected with that they have lost. C In the process of writing them, they are reconnected with what they have lost. All are correct, right? What...

Saw this in a text: "What I lack is words..." Sounded immediately odd to my ear. Although I realize the predicate is ambiguous here, i.e.: "THAT WHICH I LACK is X " However, this sounds natural: "Words ARE what I lack." And it shouldn't be the case that word order affects...