32
You use the form, not the negative meaning.
Me too
So do I.
Either of these would be acceptable.
Also
He hates mushrooms, doesn't he?
You would normally say this when you thought he hated mushrooms and were confirming it.
He hates mushrooms, does he?
This form would normally be used when expressing irritation or anger. For example, if you ...
26
The sentence is difficult to parse because it has a long relative clause with no wh-word. In addition, the relative clause has an extra phrase in the middle. It may help to think about the sentence like this:
The two men were Anton Voloshin and Igor Kornelyuk.
Now we may not know who these two men are. We could use a relative clause to explain this:
The ...
answered Mar 23 '16 at 11:08
Araucaria - Not here any more.
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25
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
Whatever "what is" is, is what I want.
(Second cup of coffee to the rescue.)
Although is appears three times in a row, it is copular only once, in is what I want.
In "What is", is means exists.
And the second is (Whatever what is is) means happens to be.
Whatever ...
22
The sentence 'Time flies like an arrow', with or without context, is very unambiguous to the native speaker. 'Time' is the subject, it metaphorically 'flies' as fast and without stopping 'like an arrow.
But the phrase is often accompanied, either before or after, by
Fruit flies like a banana.
which is word-for-word parallel, but not exactly by part of ...
20
When she opened her eyes she saw a harbor seal, twenty feet in front
of her, staring at her as would a calm dog whose yard she'd walked
into.
There's nothing missing from the basic construction.
Your example contains subject-auxiliary inversion, where the subject "a calm dog whose yard she'd walked into" and the auxiliary verb "would" ...
18
No, you can't.
Explain always takes to before the indirect object. In other languages it works, but I have never seen it in English. A search in de BNC for explain me returned 0 results.
You always explain something to someone. The preposition is fixed.
17
Short answer:
Yes, these are minor sentences. They consist of a single clause that's usually categorized under "minor clauses".
Examples of minor clauses are optatives, conditional fragments, verbless directives, parallel structures, elliptical constructions, vocatives, exclamatives, interjections and other stereotyped expressions and headlines. [1], [2], [...
16
Time flies like an arrow. is an old idiom that means time passes quickly, subjectively. Hurry up with your life because it will end before you notice.
Now the pun and the problem:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
No, there are no insects named "time flies". But there are very common insects called Fruit flies. The tiny insects appear ...
14
NOTE: ✲ at the head of an utterance marks it as unaccceptable in Standard English.
There are, broadly, three types of these “multi-word verbs”, also called “phrasal verbs” or “compound verbs”. In what follows I’m only going to address the ones which are likely to give you trouble, transitive verb+preposition compounds which take a direct object
The first ...
14
Carefully avoiding terminal prepositions has been, for at least a generation, a dead letter. There are doubtless people my age who still practice it; but nobody except a few cranks think it a defensible ‘rule’. It survives in public consciousness largely because dogmatic ‘descriptivists’ enjoy using it as a stick to whack ‘prescriptivism’.
There are, to be ...
14
In North American Engish, Monday can be used as adverb to mean on Monday, in the same way Mondays is used to mean on Mondays, on each Monday.
I have looked for sentences similar to the ones shown in the question on the Corpus of the Contemporary American English, and I found the following ones. (I looked for sentences containing "[vvd] hard [npd1]"; that is ...
13
This question is anything but clear. It's muddled by design. :^) But I'll take a shot at it.
NOAD defines sentence like this:
sentence (n.) a set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate ...
13
The seal was staring [in the same way] as a calm dog would [stare] when she had just walked into its yard.
You are expected to 'understand' the missing words, which have been left out to make the sentence shorter.
12
There is a frequently taught "rule" that sentences should not start with any of the coordinating conjunctions, i.e. and, or, but, yet, so, for, and nor. There is no actual grammatical rule as such, however, simply because such a rule doesn't make any sense. In fact, even the most ardent prescriptivists are likely to agree that starting a sentence with a ...
12
There are several different ways of producing subordinate clauses:
with that ... that he becomes/should become a baseball player
with a marked infinitive ... [him] to become a baseball player
with an unmarked infinitive ... become a baseball player
with for + a marked infinitive ... for him to become a baseball player
with a gerund ... becoming a ...
12
You can attach it if you want.
There's no difference in meaning, so you can leave it off if you want to.
12
Grammatically, this can be summed up neatly by some ungrammatical use of parentheses:
(Whatever (what is) is) is what I want.
Each phrase in parentheses is a noun phrase and can be substituted by any other noun, e.g.,
(Whatever (infinity) is) is what I want.
Another way to disambiguate is to rephrase with a demonstrative:
(Whatever (what is) is), ...
11
As a native speaker I don't often find myself using no in this way, but sometimes I may attach no to the end of a statement to turn it into a question, especially if I'm expressing doubt.
There are, however, some situations where this wouldn't sound right and you would normally say something different. Some examples:
But you arrived in town last night, no?
...
11
Ending a sentence with a contraction is entirely valid in normal English.
I tried to force myself to eat the last bite of cheesecake, but I just couldn't.
Oh, go on. I'll eat this whole chocolate bar, even though I know I shouldn't.
No, really. I mustn't.
Really. Don't do it. Just don't.
Put a spider in her bed when she's sleeping? You wouldn't!
You two are ...
11
Australia is now spending over $40 million to combat the deadly virus, but it hasn't silenced the critics, who say the response has been underdone and tardy, or hushed calls to send the military.
The money hasn't
- silenced the critics who say the response has been underdone and tardy
- or hushed calls to send the military
"hushed" here is somewhat ...
11
Consider the following examples -
He gave Mary ten dollars.
He passed Paul the ball.
The verbs - give and pass - are the examples of ditransitive verbs. They take both an indirect object as well as a direct object.
The pattern for ditransitive verb is -
ditransitive verb + Object indirect + Object direct
Consider the following sentences -
I ...
10
Lying is a present participle, a non-finite form (see the verb-forms tag wiki).
An independent clause (complete sentence) requires a finite verb.
The finite forms of lie which agree with the third-person singular dog are lies (non-past) or lay (past).
A non-finite form (infinitive lie, present participle lying, past participle lain) may be combined with ...
10
Whether is not a question word, although it looks like one.
Question words beginning with wh are the following:
what
which
where
who
whose
when
why
The rule for making questions using question words is fairly simple:
Question word + auxiliary + subject + infinite or, "QUASI" is a useful acronym. (It is not infallible but it works most of the time)
1) ...
10
It is grammatically acceptable; but it is gnarly to read.
There is a linguistic rule-of-thumb called horror aequi which states that people don't like to hear or read identical constructions too close together. The back-to-back to infinitives violate this rule; you would do better to express futurity with will:
I decided the target for our firm will be to ...
10
'come' here is not a finite verb, but a past participle used as an adjective modifying 'nightingale'. The original sentence could be expanded as:
There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale that is come over on the Cunard or White Star Line.
The unusual thing about this sentence is the use of the past participle 'come' as an adjective ...
10
It is syntactically analogous to the way it is.
I like it the way it is.
That is, "as it is (now)".
If you like the present shape of your nose, butt out.
Would you like some more milk to cool your tea down?
-- No thanks, I like it the temperature it is.
or
Shall we keep the room the color it is?
The conveyor belt is working out nicely. Let'...
9
The confusion in language processing comes because software might not catch the dual meaning of like in the full sentence (Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.).
I am not a native speaker, but I assume most people would understand it unambiguously: something abstract, such as time, or a non-rational entity, like a fruit, can not "like" ...
9
I thought that the subject is that which acts, and the object is that which is acted upon.
This is often true in an active-voice sentence, but not in a passive-voice sentence.
That which acts/is acted upon and subject/object really describe two different categories, not a single category.
That which acts and that which is acted upon are semantic roles, ...
9
Have to is not a modal verb, it is not even an auxiliary verb.
In the have to structure have is a main verb:
Examples:
Declarative sentence:
I [do] have to go
Questions:
Do I have to go?
Negatives:
I don’t have to go.
Here, as we can see, the have to structure is used with the auxiliary do. This is not something specific to a modal. A modal ...
9
In this case come is not a finite verb but a participle. If you want to paraphrase the clause it heads as a relative clause you should cast it in the perfect construction:
. . . a nightingale which has come over on the Cunard or White Star Line.
In grammatical fact, however, this is an adjectival use of the participle. Today we rarely use the ...
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