By Word order, English grammar

Hi ForbesThank you for your long reply. I do appreciate it. I would just like to say that I my opinion is based on the knowledge I have of the Germanic and Romance languages and it is of course very subjective. I fully understand that not everyone agrees with me and what I consider easy may be...

Clive wrote:The bottom line, of course, is that any of these systems is OK as long as it provides a tool that someone finds useful in learning to speak good English. Would you call this a relative clause? I don't know where the pen is. What would you say it relates to? When I asked this, I...

Hi allIt would be interesting to hear from nonnative speakers of English in particular what influence English exerts on other languages nowadays. What English words and expressions are used in your language? Does English grammar or syntax have an influence on your native language? Where is this...

Although I'm a native English speaker, I've often struggled to understand English grammar, especially its morphosyntatical elements. I've done some reading on nominative-accusative as well as ergative-absolutive cases and I just don't get it. Can someone who's better at linguistics explain this...

I always thought it was a remnant of the French (Norman Invasion, 1066). There is a handful of verbs in French conjugated with "to be" rather than "to have" in the passé composé (past) tense. Rise, born, arrive, leave, go (all "coming and going" verbs) are some examples. We also sing "He is...

Hi, I need to write a sentence in the following pattern, and I don't see how it's possible. The pattern is: adjective + direct object + helping verb + subject + verb No articles allowed? So, something like 'Great strength did he use'. This kind of odd word order seems very literary or...

The various forms of phrasal verbs Phrasal verbs can be transitive or intransitive, separable or inseparable. The object or accusative can in the cases of separable phrasal verbs be placed before or after the particle. With inseparable phrases, the object/accusative is fixed and its position...

Hello, Paco. Not that I am anywhere close to being a linguist but, according to the little history of the English language I studied years ago, the "Anglo-Saxon" words (I think Pemmican knows more about this!!), are more than just "borrowings". Low German, or some branch of it -which the Angles...

Many English nouns and noun phrases can be used as adverbs. They are called "adverbial objectives". From the standpoint of word order, an adverbial objective is put as if it were an objective of a verb, but actually it works as an adverbial modifier of the verb. This sort of constructs comes from...

Su's post: I always wonder some thing in English grammar. For instance, the sentence: I drive him. 'I' is the subject. 'Him' is the object. Yet their position have told us this too. Is that means the English grammar is sort of double expressing? For if the sentences of: I him drive. drive I...