Timeline for Can sometimes be used with a continuous tense?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 13, 2018 at 20:44 | comment | added | Lambie | I dunno, I thought innit was completely British. Sometimes, when I'm driving fast, I fancy myself a race car driver. That's contrived? I don't think so. He did leave the rest of the sentence blank. But it is true that in IE, the simple present is often eschewed to the benefit of the continuous. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 18:53 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | ...having said that, I think sometimes IE is great! In my days as a software technician I was always glad that IE introduced us to prepone as the opposite of postpone, and as a Brit I'm thoroughly signed up to the slang usage Innit, which I'm pretty sure was popularised here by people who originally came from India. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 18:48 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Raj 33: I don't know enough about IE to have an opinion on how acceptable the usage is in India, but the British 70s "sitcom" It Ain't Half Hot Mum often used to poke fun at it (back in the days when it was acceptable to laugh at how foreigners spoke). It may be that it's so common around you that you've never actually noticed that mainstream speakers in "fully Anglophone" countries avoid it. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 18:18 | comment | added | Raj 33 | @Fumble Fingers. You are right about that. I'm a young English learner and reading multiple globally accepted sources to improve my English. So, may be I've ignored that kind of mistakes. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 18:04 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Raj 33: I'm not sure what you're not sure about. Do the results from a Google search for "indian english" "present continuous" "stative verbs" not ring a bell with you? Me, I am knowing this for many decades. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 17:55 | comment | added | Yves Lefol | It is kind of a fun challenge as well, because sometimes you're trying to win over crowds that don't want to be won over, which makes me dig a bit deeper. it is an american who said that and he used continuous why | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 17:51 | comment | added | Raj 33 | @FumbleFingers I'm not sure about that. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 17:39 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Raj 33: Good for you! But are you implying that you never hear other people using continuous verb forms like that? Here in the UK, it's a very strong indicator that the speaker isn't a native Anglophone and/or that he's much more likely to come from India than anywhere else. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 17:35 | comment | added | Raj 33 | @FumbleFingers I'm an Indian and I don't use that way. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 15:32 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | You'd need a somewhat contrived context to make the continuous verb form acceptable in your example: I have this dream every night where I'm driving to work in my car, but I know I'm going to be late. Sometimes I'm driving very fast, but usually I'm just stuck in slow-moving traffic. For most "normal" contexts, using the continuous verb only occurs in "Indian English", and would usually be considered "invalid" to mainstream native speakers. | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 15:01 | vote | accept | Yves Lefol | ||
| Jan 13, 2018 at 14:54 | answer | added | Lambie | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 14:41 | comment | added | Raj 33 | Sometimes when I am driving fast, ..... | |
| Jan 13, 2018 at 14:14 | history | asked | Yves Lefol | CC BY-SA 3.0 |