46
votes
Why can't you say "A doll was made me by my sister"?
For some reason, English allows you
to turn a prepositional phrase (“My sister made a doll for me”) into an indirect object (“My sister made me a doll”), called a dative shift, or
to turn an active-...
- 6,094
14
votes
Why can't you say "A doll was made me by my sister"?
Syntactic restrictions on distransitive passivization:
Why you can be baked a cake yet a cake can never be baked you
Collins Dictionary notes, with formatting emphasis added by me:
If the indirect ...
- 7,903
5
votes
Accepted
Is “The horse that was raced past the barn fell” grammatical?
Race as a verb (it may also be a noun) may be transitive or intransitive. The relevant usage in your text is transitive:
Merriam Webster
race:
intransitive verb
1: to compete in a race
2: to go, move,...
- 1,424
3
votes
Why can't you say "A doll was made me by my sister"?
The original sentence in its active form would be:
My sister made me a doll.
Here, the verb "made" has two objects: 1) me and 2) a doll.
Some objects have priority in order over other ...
- 173
3
votes
"I am one of them who likes fast food"
The use of "them" here is wrong when used this way in modern English to refer to people who like fast food. The word was used in this way for the 1662 version of the Lord's Prayer: And ...
- 4,522
2
votes
Does English "ALWAYS" follow SVO in grammatical sentences?
Inversions of standard English word order are not necessarily ungrammatical.
Yeats wrote a poem that starts
I will arise and go now, and go to Inisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and ...
- 30.4k
2
votes
Are put/have put...are both grammatically correct?
The answer by Matt Ellen is correct only in that your option one is not grammatical and your option two is grammatical. The rest of that answer is wrong.
In English, you form perfect tenses by ...
- 30.4k
1
vote
email you received last week was/is spam
Both are possible. The use of "was" is an example of backshifting in a context other than reported speech.
In reported speech it is common to "backshift"
John said, "I am a ...
- 158k
1
vote
Accepted
Using a singular and plural in the same sentence
There's no problem in general with mixing singular and plural in the same sentence. The only requirement is that the subject and verb need to agree. But a singular subject can take action on plural ...
- 2,016
1
vote
Why can't you say "A doll was made me by my sister"?
You must use a preposition for it to make sense. (A doll was made for me, by my sister.) alternatively you could say. (My sister made me a doll.) no preposition required.
- 13
1
vote
Why can't you say "A doll was made me by my sister"?
There are two different issues here: (I) active/passive voice; and (II) prepositions/personal pronouns.
I. Active/Passive Voice:
A doll was made by my sister. (passive voice)
My sister made a doll. (...
- 3,868
1
vote
"I am one of them who likes fast food"
Usually we don't use this kind of construction at all. Usually one would say "I like fast food", or perhaps "I'm a person who likes fast food".
The construction with "one of ...
- 158k
1
vote
THE MORE constrained I expect to be, I plan to save MORE
In a construction whose parallelism rests on a pairing of two phrases that include the wording "the more," this is the basic form that the parallelism takes:
the more X, the more Y
where X ...
- 546
1
vote
Accepted
Which sentence is correct: "I hope you and her are fine." or "I hope you and she are fine."?
This isn't very scientific, but the rule of thumb is the absence or presence of a preposition. This has to do with cases, which used to be a feature of the English language but is no longer so: ...
- 3,078
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