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Apple's question: ...Is the following sentence acceptable? (1)I have seen the same person twice in the past two weeks. _______ This sentence is acceptable. The expressions "in the last xxx" or "in the past xxx" can be confusing because "last" or "past" seem to refer to a time period that is over. However, the speaker who is saying "in the last xxx" or in the "past xxx" is still within the time frame, although probably at the end of it. S/He could substitute "in the most recent xxx." In the...Read More...

In the first sentence, the example must be part of a larger unit. A complete sentence might be, for example: "¢ We watched the more than 500 participants in the marathon as they rounded the corner and sprinted ahead for the final lap. "¢ The more than 500 mid-sized cities were represented by their mayors and financial planners. In each of these sentences, the 500 xxx is an already defined group of 500. The definite article refers to these 500. ______ In the second sentence, I can find no...Read More...

Thank you for clarifying the issue for me. CorinneRead More...

The critics are "severe," right? And they're "numerous," right? (You can't say "increasing critics"; you would have to say "increasing number of critics.") The word "increasing," then, must have been meant to modify the adjective "numerous." Therefore it must be in the form of an adverb, since adjectives are modified by adverbs, not adjectives. The correct form of the phrase is severe and increasingly numerous critics Note: predeterminers are words like "all," "both," and "half." This phrase...Read More...

optional. In this case, prepositional phrases are parallel. The other one, objects of the preposition are parallel.Read More...

Unless prepositional phrase is seen, parallelism at PP level seems ungrammatical. Let us look at the following Nouns: 3.Urban apartments for which she called 4.Urban apartments which she called for Sentence 4 clearly reflects the meaning of phrasal verb, whereas sentence 3 does not.Read More...

There's no such form as "*Books are us." You may have seen the name of a toy store called "Toys 'R Us." This is not natural English; it's a trade name. A statement of ownership needs the definite article or another determiner before the noun, hence the correct forms would be These books are ours The books on the top shelf are ours ; the other ones are hers BUT These books belong to us Finally, a pronoun that comes after the verb be and that refers to the grammatical subject is not an object...Read More...

The commas in this question belong to the appositive " burned by departing Baathists ". Appositive is a word or phrase that immediately follows the other word or phrase to identify or explain it. Here the writer used the appositive to explain a building in Baghdad . Words in apposition can be either parenthetical or defining. Usually if they are parenthetical (i.e. merely to provide further information), they are set off with commas as shown in this sentence. If you remove the appositive...Read More...

No, that construction doesn't exist in English. With the "It's easy" cleft sentence, the only complement is the infinitive, e.g. It's easy to make New Year's resolutions but less easy to keep them; It's not easy for my husband and me to make ends meet. You can think of the complement as a unit: the "for-to" complement construction." That's what it's called in linguistics. Marilyn MartinRead More...

The verb should agree with the subject rather than the subject complement. For this particular sentence, I'd say the correct sentence is: The first thing I noticed about him was his eyes. because the first thing is the singular-noun subject of this sentence. Since his eyes is an identifying complement, subject-complement reversal is possible. If reversed, the use of verb is changed as follows: His eyes were the first thing I noticed about him. Now the subject of the sentence becomes a plural...Read More...

As I said ealier, much , in the sense of very , is usually used with adjectival past participles. Ex: much interested, much pleased by the compliment, or much gratified. The use of not much good seems to be an idiomatic expression. The use of much to modify other adjectives might be possible, but, based on my google search, I didn't see any good examples of such usage.Read More...

The only one in which as can be paraphrased easily is 6c): 6c) We will be closed for the next two days, as/because the heating system has broken down and needs to be repaired (reason) The rest of the examples do not seem to have alternatives for the "as" phrases, many of which are idioms or at least idiomatic. Maybe other members will have suggestions. Marilyn MartinRead More...

No, the quoted material is the direct object of the verb said and has nothing to do with the present participle forcing . The subject of the main clause is grammarians and the verb of the main clause is said . Compare: She said "Yes," making me the happiest man in the world It was the action of saying "yes," not the "yes" itself, that caused the speaker/writer to become the happiest man in the world. Marilyn MartinRead More...

Since this latest question is on another topic, I'm posting it as a new query. Look for it under "Present participle--function in sentence?"Read More...

Corpus search yields more examples with the article before "kimono" than those without it.."a" is almost always used when an adjective is attached as in " a bright colored kimono". The kimono, a kimono, her kimono,. My humble analysis and guess in regard to kimono is that Japanese language does not have singular plural sense. We can safely say "This three pen" instead of "these three pens." " I have many book" is correct in Japanese. We don't always add "s" at the end of plural count nouns.Read More...

It's not "against the rule," because there is no across-the-board rule against such usage. In the case of "long" it would be very rare indeed to find the "more" comparative. With "red," you will find "redder" and, occasionally, "more red." It depends on the word involved as well as on the speaker's or writer's choice. A good way to find out about the frequency of such collocations is to do a Google search for each version. Marilyn MartinRead More...

Dear Marilyn and Rachel, I would like to thank you both for your very informative comments! Best, GiseleRead More...

The writer, most likely a speaker of British English, has chosen to use the plural verb with the noun "government" and then has switched to the singular form for the pronoun references. This is unusual. Biber et al.* state "Collective nouns can occur with both singular and plural personal pronouns and possessive determiners..." (p. 331) They give as the only example relevant to Ananja's query this sentence: The committee has decided that their faithful followers should be the ones to decide...Read More...

English speakers quite often use "know" when they mean "know of" in casual speech. The hearer usually understands what is meant. If there is any uncertainty, the hearer asks for clarification. Marilyn MartinRead More...

In your sentence, "alive" and "living" mean the same thing. They are synonyms. However, there are differences in construction of some sentences with "alive" and "living." For example, "alive" has to appear after a linking verb or after the noun itself; you CAN"T say "an alive person," but of course you can say "a living person." And, "alive" can be followed by a prepositional phrase, such as "The hills were alive with the sound of music," but NOT "The hills were living with the sound of...Read More...

Chuncan Feng's analysis covers almost the whole issue. A little more needs to be explained. Let's look at each of the sentences. 1. It is important to me to attend the meeting. It depends on the discourse up to that point. If there is no other party mentioned or understood to be considered for attendance at the meeting, the one involved is the speaker. For example: There's a strategy meeting tomorrow at 8 in the board room. It's important to me to attend because they're considering my...Read More...

Both forms are correct. The statement is probably British English usage. British English uses the present perfect much more than does American English. There is nothing mysterious in the use of the present perfect. The speaker is referring to the present situation, the "aftermath" of the action of "catching." (American English often uses the simple past for such situations, as in "The mail arrived" meaning that the mail is now here.) According to the historian of the English language, Otto...Read More...

Grin is a count noun and glee is a mass (noncount) noun. A good learner's dictionary will give you examples of each. Marilyn MartinRead More...

One of my students wrote that sentence. We know that we can say "I don't know who to trust", but I was at a loss what to say when faced with "who to help me". Thanks. Chuncan FengRead More...

In the student workbook we are using here there is a sentence to be translated from Chinese into English. The original Chinese sentence has no context: there is not a list of candidates available. The teacher's book says that the correct translation is "I don't know which city to settle in." Just as you said in your post, I thought the use of "which" would need a list of target cities. So I posted the question so as to be prepared to answer students' questions. Chuncan FengRead More...