etymology - Talkies, Motion Pictures, Movies, Films and 3D

The term talkies, i.e. talking pictures, I was surprised to learn was not coined in 1927 after the release of The Jazz Singer, but in 1913. The term is now obsolete whereas motion picture, meaning moving pictures on a screen, has existed since 1896, although it's become more dated. Movie, its shortened and more modern version, dated possibly from 1908, is still very much in vogue in the US.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says that film (the more popular BrEng equivalent for movie) was

First used of "motion pictures" in 1905.

British speakers will say:

1. Have you seen the new James Bond film?




2. We watched a film about prison life.




3. The film was made on location in India.

American speakers, if I'm not mistaken, will use film in sentence number two, and movie in the others. Movie is connected more with entertainment, whereas film is considered more of an art form, an undergraduate will take Film & Media Studies, not Movies & Media Studies.

My questions:

• I'd like to know when the term talkies as in "talking pictures" died out. When was it no longer considered a novelty and people reverted back to saying motion pictures/movies?


• Why the term, film, was adopted by British speakers and most European countries when motion pictures is arguably the authentic expression and therefore, the more accurate term.


• Lastly, which term is more common: 3D film or 3D movie? (The latter does sound odd to my ears.)

possessives - What's the genitive of "someone else"?

This is Konrad.
He has a dog.
Hence, it's Konrad's dog.

This is someone else.
He has a cat.

1. Hence it's someone else's cat.


2. Hence it's someone's else cat.


3. Hence it's someones else cat.


4. Hence it's someone elses cat.

I know that I can say "it's a cat of someone else" or "it's a cat belonging to someone else" but that dodges the issue, not answering the question.

Answer

According to The Cambridge Guide of English Usage, so well established are phrases like "someone else", "anyone else", "what else" and "who else" that else can take the possessive form quite easily.

In the light of the above reference the possessive of "someone else" is "someone else's".

It is worth noting that "This usage was once frowned on by those who insisted that else was an adverb and so could be made possessive", and this presumably justifies your doubts.

grammaticality - Divide two into four and Divide two by four

Why does "divide two into four" equal two, and "divide two by four" equal one half?

Correct if I am wrong, but this what I have learned recently.

Answer

OP's confusion arises because "divide 2 into 4" is an idiomatic usage meaning perform a division operation, using 2 as the divisor, and 4 as the dividend.

symbolically...
4/2 = 2

clearest verbal form...
divide 4 by 2, giving the answer 2

idiomatic alternative...
divide 2 into 4, giving the answer 2

It's not the same usage as dividing a pizza into 4 [pieces], where you'd probably get 1/4 (a quarter) of a pizza as your share!

nouns - Why is a woman a "widow" and a man a "widower"?

There are lots of words that have male and female forms, and usually there are alternate suffixes to the words which indicate the gender; for example, "waiter" vs. "waitress", "mister" vs. "mistress", etc. The one that has always puzzled me, though, is "widow" and "widower". Following the form of the previous examples, I understand "widower" for men--but why the form of the word with no suffix for women? Why isn't a woman called a "widowess"?

Answer

I suspect because the phrase was only needed for women and widower is a much later literary invention.

Widow had a lot of legal implications for property, titles and so on. If the survivor of a marriage was a woman things got complicated before women had many rights.
If the survivor was a man in the middle ages it didn't really make much difference as he held all the property anyway.

A similar question came up about illegitimate girl children, there was no word because there was no legal need to consider them.

For the rest - English generally doesn't have many genders anymore and those that have survived are where it was necessary to know the actual sex. So for example "actress" once had rather more of a euphemism role (like the modern 'model actress whatever') — where knowing their sex is relatively important.

present tense - "Why are you asking?" versus "Why do you ask?"

Why are you asking Tom? He does not know the answer. Ask me instead!

versus

No, I have not seen Tom for quite some time. Why do you ask?

Is it correct? And if it is, why the difference? Is it not in both cases a single action ('ask') happening at or around the time of speaking?

I guess that the answer is to do with the fact that, in the first sentence, the pupil knows why the teacher is asking Tom, (in order to get an answer, which goes without saying), whereas in the second sentence, I do not know the reason the person who asked me whether I had seen Tom lately did so.

The difference here would be parallel to the difference between Present Perfect Simple –'I have repaired the car.' – where the emphasis is on the result of the action, and Present Perfect Continuous – 'There is grease on my hands because I have been repairing the car.' – where the emphasis is on the action itself, is more descriptive, and we do not know whether the result, getting the car repaired, has been achieved or not.

Answer

I disagree somewhat with Barrie.

For most verbs the simple present can be used only in a habitual sense:

Why do you hit him?*

is unambiguously asking about your habit, not about this particular instance. Why are you hitting him? or Why did you hit him? would be usual for that case.

For some verbs, particularly denoting mental state, the continuous is not normally used (or has a particular connotation if it is used), and the present is normal:

Why do you want that?

Why do you think that?

What do you see?

The verb ask appears to refer to an act, rather than a mental state; but it nevertheless can behave like those verbs and take the simple present.

*In ordinary speech, you may hear why d'ya hit him?, but this generally represents why did you hit him? not why do you hit him?

orthography - "An SQL Server database schema" or "a SQL Server database schema"?

I got the following sentence from the book I'm reading:

You can take a database-first approach
by first creating a SQL Server
database schema.

From what I learned, I think it should be "an SQL Server database schema", not "a SQL Server database schema". So which one is correct?

Answer

This depends, I would think, on your pronunciation of SQL. It can be pronounced as "sequel", or spelled out as "S-Q-L". That perhaps doesn't help in written English.

A thoroughly scientific survey of Google throws up many more hits for "an SQL" than "a SQL". This is also the form used on that Wikipedia article and elsewhere, such as this Microsoft SQL Server documentation entitled "Executing an SQL Query".

word choice - "Prefer to do something" vs. "prefer doing something"

What's the difference between the two:

• What materials do they prefer working with?


• What materials do they prefer to work with?

word choice - Is it incorrect to use "hard" when I mean "difficult"?

My late grandfather had several word-choice peeves for which he would gently interrupt a speaker, especially a grandchild, in order to correct. The one I remember most was his dislike for the use of "hard" as a synonym for "difficult," as in the statement:

This homework is really hard.

I read and hear "hard" used this way all the time and often wonder if there is something incorrect about it. Is there, or has there ever been, any basis for this quibble?

Answer

There is nothing incorrect about hard being used that way. It's just more colloquial than difficult, but other than that, they are synonyms, and have been for a long time. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations going back all the way to 1340:

• a1340 HAMPOLE Psalter vi. 4 Ful hard it is to be turnyd enterly til þe bryghthed and þe pees of godis lyght.


• c1440 Promp. Parv. 227/1 Harde yn knowynge, or warkynge, difficilis.


• 1559 W. CUNINGHAM Cosmogr. Glasse 97 It is as harde, and laborus, to get the Longitude.


• 1611 BIBLE Transl. Pref. 2 So hard a thing it is to please all.


• ...

I actually don't have access to the OED — where I'm quoting this from is this excellent Language Log entry. Highly recommended reading.

To that, I think it is worth adding that difficult is only some 600-odd years old. It is a back formation from difficulty, which in turn was borrowed from Old French in the late 14th century. Hard, on the other hand, has been around for much longer and came straight from Old English. So it's actually the more venerable way of saying "difficult".

word choice - "Which" instead of "whose" for inanimate objects

Someone I know strongly insists that the usage of "which" in the following type of sentence

I'm living in a country which language I have been learning for less than 5 months.

is perfectly appropriate, after I attempted to correct them by suggesting to replace "which" with "whose".

I am aware that some people frown upon using "whose" with inanimate or non-person referents, seeing it as a form of "who", which is generally reserved for people or personalized animals; that is not what I am specifically concerned with (I don't care much either way), but if the speaker elects to avoid "whose" in a sentence like the above, they should obviously replace it with something grammatical, and I do not think "which" qualifies.

They also insist that the following paragraph, which we randomly found on the web while debating it and searching for related examples,

Schedule 3.23 sets forth list and description of all insurance policies currently owned by the Company relating to the Development Work or the assets of the Company, which policies are in full force and effect, and the Company is not in default under any of them.

is akin to the former sentence in its (presumably correct) usage of "which", strengthening their stance.

I think the two are completely different, as the latter is a list of things that "Schedule 3.23 sets forth", and not a relative clause; I also believe n-gram searches like this or this one are clear evidence that even if "whose" might not be ideal in these cases, "which" is certainly just unusable.

This also logically follows, in my opinion, from the realization that "whose" is semantically equivalent to "of which", except for style and for the fact it is mostly used with people, and "of which" clearly cannot be equivalent to "which" alone.

So, is the initial quotation I provided acceptable in English as the other person claims? Are my objections to that valid?

Answer

John Lawler wrote in a comment:

The legal pied-piping that your friend points to is restricted to lawyers, and is not the same construction that appears in the ungrammatical sentence you point out: *I'm living in a country which language I have been learning for less than 5 months. That's because which has no antecedent -- it can't be country, because countries aren't languages, and it can't modify languages because it's not possessive. The sole possessive relative pronoun is whose, and it applies to all noun antecedents, masculine, feminine, or neuter.

meaning - "Skyscrapers are of various shapes" vs. "skyscrapers are various shapes"

• Skyscrapers are of various shapes.


• Skyscrapers are various shapes.

Why do we use of in the sentence above?

Is there any difference in meaning between the two sentences?

Answer

Ellipsis occurs in many constructions in English.

Words considered non-vital are often omitted.

Here, the post-modifying adjectival prepositional phrase 'of various shapes' is seen to be ellipted by the omission of the preposition:

2) Skyscrapers are of various shapes.

1) Skyscrapers are various shapes.

The use of a preposition is optional in the following sentences.

Prepositions are often omitted from temporal adverbials / whatever temporal 'additives' go with be:

We were here (in) the winter before last.

She visited us (on) the day before yesterday.

She was here (in) the previous December.

They waited (for) two hours for the bus to come.

I'd say it doesn't make sense for 'two hours' in the elided last example to be analysed as a direct object. There is a name for such DO-lookalikes, noun groups functioning adverbially and/or locatively / directionally / temporally: adverbial objectives.

The Rohirrim went north. Is John home yet? Today I came a different way. Elms stood either side of the street. Let's go some place. He lives next door.

Similarly, though the corresponding adjectival usage is, I feel, very rare, I'd class 'various shapes' in OP's elided example as an adjectival rather than a DO:

Skyscrapers are typically rectangular, stepped, or subtly rounded. Yes,

Skyscrapers are rectangular, stepped, or subtly rounded.

Skyscrapers are various shapes.

Though the 'adjectival objective' (don't quote me! - at least for a while) is very uncommon, the few examples that do exist seem to be increasing in popularity, as this Google Ngram seems to indicate. On the first page of Google hits for "are different shapes", 5 are obviously this usage as opposed to 2 which are obviously other constructions (following existential 'there' . . .).

In some cases, the 'of', complete, version, would sound ridiculous:

The Shard and the Gherkin are not the same shape / size.

but obviously 'the same shape' / 'the same size' can't be taken as DOs.

I suppose that there is the slight possibility of confusion:

The pyramids and kites on pages 2 and 3 are different shapes.

usage - Would you italicize chapatis?

I guess "chapati" is foreign word and should be italicized in a text. But what about plural? The foreign word is actually chapati, and the plural is made using the English "s" (even if, maybe, chapati is like "bread", singular). What's correct?

Answer

Regarding chapatti itself, I recall that the word was not set off either in quotes or italics the first time I read it in a novel several decades ago.

This may be due to the fact that it's a British novel that deals with a former British possession, or that it's a first-person narrative by a character who is no Oxford don, but I incline toward the feeling that certain words, especially those relating to food, are not subject to the usual arm's-length treatment other words might be. We refer to tortillas, empanadas, brioche, linguini, sauerbraten and borscht all without that crutch, and we get along just fine.

Normally we reserve italics for foreign words for which we already have a ready English equivalent (frisson for "thrill"), or for which no comparable word exists in English (gemütlichkeit), or which the writer or editor decides is too recondite (kulturny)—and it is worth noting that the decision really rests on the person or organization who puts the words up for publication.

It is sometimes hard to avoid the suspicion that italicization can be overdone, or used as an affectation. And styles do vary. The New Yorker seems to italicize foreign words within an inch of their lives, while other publications take a much milder stance on the matter.

Full disclosure: I have asked a question similar to this one and came away feeling no real sense of closure on the subject.

How do American English and British English use the definite article differently?

I decided to make sure that I know this important difference between American and British English, so I wrote what I have found out so far and I would be grateful to anyone who reads this and tells me whether I am wrong, or not.

In British English when people say to hospital or in hospital when talking about somebody being there as a patient they don't use the definite article : "I had to go to hospital", "She spent two weeks in hospital". And the meaning is that somebody was there as a patient.

If then for some other reasons British English speakers will use the definite article which will change the meaning itself, I noticed that, in American English, native speakers often use the the and if they need to show that somebody is in church to pray, in school as a student, in hospital as a patient, in prison as a prisoner, they use 'in' and not 'at'. Do American English speakers use 'at' like British English speakers use 'the' to give the sentences a different meaning?

Are my sentences correct? Do they show American English usage?

• He is in the school. (enrolled as a student)




• He is at the school. (for some different reasons)





• He is in the hospital. (as a patient)




• He is at the hospital. (visiting somebody)




• He is in the church. (to pray)




• He is at the church. (for some different reasons)




• He is in the university. (as a student)




• He is at the university. (not as a student)




• He is in the college. (as a student)




• He is at the college. (Not as a student)




• He is in the prison. (as a prisoner)




• He is at the prison. (not as a prisoner)

nouns - What is the plural of the abbreviation of "multiplicity automaton", "MA" or "MAs"?

The "multiplicity automaton (MA)" is a model in compute science and its plural is "multiplicity automata". Should the plural of the abbreviation be MA or MAs?

---

What is the correct way to pluralize an acronym? is not a duplicate as it is focused on cases like "ATMs" where the expanded form "automated teller machines" has a regular plural ending in "s." Unlike "machines," the word "automata" has an irregular plural that does not end in "s." It's unclear from the linked answers how abbreviations that end in words like this should be pluralized. A high-ranking answer by Neil Fein mentions "VIPs," but a high-ranking comment by oosterwal says

VIPs' is a strange one. It could be argued that the expanded acronym,
when pluralized, should be 'Very Important People' rather than 'Very
Important Persons'. Using this argument, 'VIP' could be used as a

singular or plural noun. "The VIP has arrived." "The VIP have
arrived." I'm not sure anyone else would agree with my logic, though.

grammar - "a little surprising", "little surprising"

Are:

"it is a little surprising"

and

"it is little surprising"

equivalent? I have a feeling that in the former, it means "I'm slightly surprised, have not expected this" in the latter, "there's no surprise, it's obvious". But, some people seem to use them interchangeably. What's the norm/use here?

Gerund or infinitive / Difference in meaning

In my classes, the subject of gerunds and infinitives comes up. Students find this a confusing and frustrating subject. They accept that one can say "I like watching movies," or "I like to watch movies," but they will usually ask, "Which one should I use?" This question makes sense. I have seen most teachers answer this by saying "It doesn't matter, they both mean th same thing. Pick one that you like and use it."

I feel that there is a difference and that as native English speakers we intuitively know the difference and will choose the expression that conveys our meaning.

Sometimes, I feel that this choice is language mirroring. If someone asks you "What do you like doing," you will probably answer with the gerund, "I like watching." If they ask "What do you like to do," you will probably answer "I like to watch."

However, if you say to someone "Tell me about your interests," the person is free to answer, and some will give the gerund version and others will give the infinitive version.

My feeling is that infinitives express potential and gerunds express active things. If you say "I like to watch TV." it means that this is something you like but don't really do it that much. If you say "I like watching TV." it is probably something you do a lot. On the flip side, you could also interpret "I like watching TV." as you like the activity but it doesn't mean you do it. "I like mountain climbing," doesn't necessarily mean that I do it, have done it, or will do it.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

Answer

The verbs where you have a choice between gerund or to-infinitive is very limited, a handful I would say. Actually there is no difference whether you say I like cooking/I like to cook. But I assume the "cooking" is more frequent as you refer to a general kind of activity.

Comment added to this post
The to-infinitive has noun character. The "to" might have been the neutre form of the definite article , but gender was given up very early in English. As the gerund has verbal and noun character English has two possibilities for verb +object. The to-infinitive as object is more frequent, in some cases the speakers prefer the gerund. That is more a convential thing and a problem for learners, because there is no simple rule for gerunds in object-position.

punctuation - Punctuating question tags: A question mark is always required, isn't it. (Well, isn't it?)

Consider the sentence:

You didn't leave the dog in the car, did you?

In spoken English, this statement may be given with a rising intonation or a falling one. If the former, it suggests that leaving the dog in the car is a bad thing, and might even suggest incredulity and consternation on the part of the person asking.

In the latter case, when the sentence ends with a falling intonation, the speaker probably believes that the dog should have been left in the car, and that the person being addressed fell short. It amounts to an accusation.

Now, given that question tags are always questions, it seems they ought to be punctuated with a question mark. But in written form, especially dialogue, it feels to me that question tags meant to be spoken with a falling intonation might get by with just a period:

You didn't leave the dog in the car, did you.

I've tried Web searches but haven't gotten close to a set of search terms that point me toward an appropriate source. Anybody know of a definitive answer to this question?

Further Reflection

One of the reasons I ask this is that any declarative statement may be changed into a question by means of a rising intonation at the end.

You left the dog in the car.

becomes a question if your voice modulates upward at the end. In written English, it is customary to show that by means of a question mark:

You left the dog in the car?

I include this information because @FumbleFingers asserts that "punctuation may not be used to differentiate [someone's] two intonations." Yet clearly there are cases in which punctuation is used in precisely that way (though in this case involving the opposite modulation from what I'm suggesting). So I wonder if it might not be possible to move the needle in the other direction.

If not, why not?

Note: I almost accepted my own answer to this question, but retracted it. If someone comes up with a better one I'll certainly consider awarding that one the checkmark. I think this question touches on an important concept, despite the scant attention it has received.

Answer

The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition (2003) has this entry under "Exclamation Point":

6.77 Exclamation rather than question. A question that is essentially an exclamation usually ends with an exclamation point.

How could you possibly believe that!

When will I ever learn!

If we take this guidance seriously, it seems to me, then for like reasons we ought to find it acceptable for a question that is essentially a statement to end with a period.

Consider this lyric from Lisa Germano's song "Bad Attitude": "But if life was easy, you wouldn't learn anything, now would you." I certainly wouldn't criticize a writer for complying with the standard approach of ending that statement with a question mark—and in fact I believe that Ms. Germano does use that punctuation. Nevertheless, given that her more-speaking-than-singing voice drops by more than an octave between "now" and "would you," I wouldn't think it misleading to end the sentence with a period.

In addition, Chicago 15 has an entry under "Question Mark" for what it calls "courtesy questions":

6.74 Courtesy question. A request courteously disguised as a question does not require a question mark.

Would you kindly respond by March 1.

Will the audience please rise.

That gives us two instances in which a widely influential U.S. reference work endorses using punctuation other than a question mark to end a phrase otherwise structured as a question.

I tend to agree with Robusto that strict adherence to the rule requiring all statements that are laid out in a form that would normally identify them as questions to end in question marks prevents writers from indicating, as they otherwise might, whether the intonation of the speaker's voice is rising or falling. The bad aspect of any widespread effort to differentiate intonation by punctuation is that it invites countless instances where authors choose punctuation mismatched to their intended intonation, and readers—newly alert for clues to intonation in the punctuation—consequently misinterpret the sentence.

grammaticality - "[Noun] upon [noun]" — singular or plural?

I am copy-editing a manuscript in which the author has written the following sentence:

Rank upon rank of theologians has envisioned God the Father as the omniscient and omnipotent one.

"Rank upon rank" suggests plurality, so my instinct is to change "has" to "have". Am I right?

Alternatively, I'm tempted to suggest a more invasive change to avoid the awkwardness altogether. I suspect, however, that I personally do not understand how to handle countable and uncountable nouns with verbs, and I don't want to push this author unfairly toward a less creative sentence in the meantime.

adjectives - Agreement With Compound Subjects Joined by And

I was surfing the internet the other day when I found this phrase:
Instead your precious time and attention is wasted.
To my ears, it sounds wrong. But I'm not a native English speaker, so I consulted with a number of them, and some of them said that it was "is" because the adjective modifies only the noun "time" and not "attention". Others said it "is" because that's just how it is.
But I still believe it should be "are". Any help is appreciated.

Answer

The claim about the influence of the adjective is misleading – the major question is whether time and attention are separate concepts or time and attention is a single composite concept. See at http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/Subject-Verb-Agreement.htm (under
'Agreement With Compound Subjects Joined by And')

Consider:

Bacon and eggs is my favourite breakfast.

Bacon and eggs are both a lot more expensive than they were 40 years
ago.

Usually, there is a virtually idiomatic status with 'apparently plural assemblages treated as singular':

Bangers and mash, also known as sausages and mash, is a traditional
British dish...

Fish and chips is a take-away food...

Research and development is of great importance in business...

We believe that good health and safety is important...

(all Google)

There are relevant hits for "time and attention is...":

Or is it because so much time and attention is given to the latter

but also for "time and attention are":

But equally important is the nature of the instruction to which student time and attention are devoted.

Time and attention are equally important in the consumer market

The concepts are inter-related and thus may be considered as a whole, but the words do not really constitute a fixed expression, and so may also be considered individually within the phrase.

meaning - What part of speech is 'say' ? If I were, say, to use it?

I can use 'say' as a noun :

(Chicago Tribune 2007) Aflac Insurance - the first U.S. company to voluntarily offer its shareholders a say on pay.

OED

(Presumably it is an uncountable noun and the shareholders were able to have their say.)

But I can also use it as a 'limiter' or 'definer' :

If I were to, say, crash my car : would my insurance company lend me a courtesy car under my policy ?

What part of speech is 'say' in this sentence ?

And what does it, technically, mean ?

Does it mean 'let us say' ?

Does it have the same meaning in :

Say, man - have you got a light ?

I have found it difficult to take this any further as I do not know what part of speech to look up and the word is so common in its other uses that I am frustrated in defining this particular usage.

Answer

Interesting question. My initial reaction was as yours: That it started out as ‘let us say’. French uses the expression ‘disons’ in exactly the same way: to indicate something given as an illustration or for the sake of argument. French has a first person plural imperative, where English has to cobble one together.

OED recognises this parenthetical usage of ‘,say,’ as being equivalent to “,shall we say?” or “,let us say,”. So you have that support, though I could not find a specific example of its use from OED and so could not trace its origin.

I could find nothing helpful in the Oxford English Grammar either. So I am left with the question: can this usage be parsed? I don’t think it can. It might stand for ‘shall we say?’, which would make it first person plural future active indicative interrogative; It could be first person plural imperative active.

I would suggest that it is what in ancient Greek I would call a signpost expression: a signal. There may be a technical term for it, but I am not aware of it.

What ‘,say,’ is doing is to send an instruction to our brains about how to read or understand the next word(s) or even the sentence as a whole. It is saying something like “don’t take this literally as the only situation I want to know about”, or “this is for illustrative purposes only”. So If the insurance agent of your example gave an unqualified ‘yes’, knowing that if you took your car off road and got stuck or or had it stolen, having left your keys in the ignition the answer would be ‘no’, she would not have responded fairly.

There are other such verbal signposts: as it were, to apologise for a somewhat metaphorical way of saying something, could just about be parsed but that is not the point; bless him is not a request to the Almighty to bring blessings on the small child that has just done or said something appealingly funny, parsed as imperative as it may be. They are, in the sense I have described, ‘signpost expressions’: parsing, even where possible, is not the point.

grammatical number - "Many lost their life" or "Many lost their lives"

Many individuals lost their individual life.
or
Many individuals list their individual lives.

Each person has one life right?

Answer

In the simplest sentences, the object agrees in number with the subject.

• He is a student.


• They are students.

However, the object does not need to agree with the number of the subject and the verb. None of these is incorrect:

• Most families today own a car.


• Both of them sprained an ankle during the trek.


• They all thought they had an answer to the problem.


• Teenage vandals are a problem in this neighbourhood.

In your sample sentences, the object life takes the plural pronoun their, and each of the sentences carries a different meaning.

• Many lost their life. (All of them together had one life to lose: their life.)


• Many lost their lives. (Each of them lost one or more lives, practically understood to mean that each of them lost their own life as people usually have only the one life to lose.)


• All my opponents lost a life trying to collect that torque bow in Level 7 of the game.


• All my opponents lost lives trying to collect that torque bow in Level 7 of the game.

You could also take a look at page 54 of Rodney Huddleston's English Grammar for some more details and examples.

Limitations of Subordination and Nested Clauses

I'm an English teacher who often has to grapple with explaining to students the complexity of clause structure in English, and after reading an article about various 'longest sentences' in fiction, I got to wondering if anyone has ever done any research into the cognitive limitations or constraints on the amount of nesting an average reader can understand.
That's the basic question: is there any research on what our nested clause comprehension limits are?

But there are loads of related questions that might be relevant here, too, like:
How many embedded clauses can you insert in a main clause before the latter element ceases to make sense?
Is there a fixed limit on the amount of nesting we can follow?
How different are English speakers in their ability to track meaning across clauses?

Answer

Susumu Kuno has reported on this in a number of works. Here are a few references in McCawley's excellent text on the linguistic analysis of English.

grammaticality - Which is correct: "what if there was" or "what if there were"?

Is this correct grammar?

What if there was a site on…

Shouldn't it be "what if there were a site on…"?

Answer

Prescriptively, you're correct, this should be were since this is being expressed with the subjunctive mood. Descriptively, I think you'll find both in the wild. In informal speech, most people I know would prefer was in this case (and those that don't are sticklers for the subjunctive). I do think that you are much more likely to see were written though, especially in formal writing. Either form is correct, and the subjunctive forms are far from dead.

A more interesting question, I think, is whether or not the subjunctive mood is still being used and if the two forms have simply collapsed together. Is this a meaningful distinction? How could this be tested?

commas - How do you punctuate an if/then when both the "if" and the "then" are implied?

Examples:

• If you lie, then you're out.




• If you do it right, then you can have a cookie.

The above are standard if/then clauses. "If" is a subordinating conjunction introducing a subordinate clause, so it is separated from the main clause, the "then" clause, by an ensuing comma. Now I know that if you leave the "then" implied, that you still use a comma.

Examples:

• If you lie, you're out.




• If you do it right, you can have a cookie.

HOWEVER, it has become common to leave the "if" implied as well, but how do you punctuate it?

Examples:

• You lie, you're out. --or-- You lie; you're out.


• You do it right, you can have a cookie. --or-- You do it right; you can have a cookie.

Part of me thinks that a comma is necessary because the first clause is still subordinate with or without the subordinating conjunction "if." But then another part of me thinks that lacking an explicit "if," it isn't actually a subordinate clause, so the two clauses become interdependent, so a semicolon instead of a comma is called for.

Here's why I think that:

• I like it, but I don't love it.

When we use a conjunction to introduce an additional clause, we separate them with a comma. However, when we omit the conjunction but leave the conjunction implied, we can no longer grammatically use a comma to separate the clauses but must instead use a semicolon.

• I like it; I don't love it.

So following that line of thinking, maybe a semicolon is required in the examples above.

I have searched the internet for how to punctuate if/then sentences when both the "if" and the "then" are implied, but I have not been able to find anything on the subject. All I can find are grammatical explanations for omitting the "then," not the "if" too.

Any light you shed would be greatly appreciated.

participles - Participial clause?

On ELL a user has asked how to parse the emphasized -ing form in this sentence from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone:

Harry swung at it with the bat to stop it from breaking his nose, and sent it zigzagging away into the air.

I am puzzled how to answer.

Zigzagging could be taken as an adjectival participle modifying it; certainly if you delete zigzagging you're left with away into the air as the ordinary complement demanded by send: you send something somewhere.

But that isn't how the semantics work for me. Send here seems to me to be a causative and zigzag a non-finite verb, which could be paraphrased with an infinitive:

He sent it zigzagging away into the air = He caused it to zigzag away into the air.
He sent him riding away to London. = He caused him to ride away to London.
He sent him packing. = He caused him to pack [i.e., to hurry away].

Thus it zigzagging away seems to me to be a full clause. But I have not found any formal description of subordinate clauses employing the -ing form where the clause does not act as a nominal, and that is clearly not the case here: ordinary NP complements to sent are Direct Objects and Indirect Objects.

So how do Modern Grammars analyze this construction, by what tests do they establish this analysis, and what do they call the construction?

Answer

McCawley doesn't say much about it, as far as I can see, but it appears to be a variety of the complex of serial verb constructions around motion verbs and their inchoatives and causatives, like the various serial verb constructions mentioned in this freshman grammar exam question (#4, restricted to come and go):

• Bill went and dug some clams. (go and + V)


• He asked us to come eat the clams. (come + V)


• He said “Come and get it!” (come and + V)


• We’re going to go eat them. (go + V)


• We'll go swimming afterwards. (go + V-ing)


• We'll come strolling in late tonight. (come + V-ing)

But there are lots more verbs that cause motion, and motion has a number of verb-like properties, so this construction complex gets much broader in scope. E.g,

Harry swung at it with the bat
to stop it from breaking his nose,
and

• went muttering curses out the door


• came lurching out the door


• brought her shuddering back to consciousness


• plucked it screaming out of the air


• sent it zigzagging away into the air



• tossed it spinning down the stairs


• dropped it unmoving into the cauldron

There are a number of possibilities here:
the initial verb part of the serial verb may be

• an intransitive motion verb (go, come)


• a transitive causative/inchoative of a motion verb (respectively: take, bring)


• a transitive verb that entails some kind of induced motion (pluck, send, toss, drop, etc.)

while the gerund part normally describes some property of

• the motion induced by the verb (lurching, zigzagging, spinning), or


• the object or person caused to move (muttering, shuddering, screaming, unmoving)

In either case, it is the moving object that functions as subject of the gerund constituent and displays the property; one may give it several different kinds of PS, but I'd treat these more or less the same way I treat phrasal verbs, as a discontinuous construction with two parts that share the semantic load, subject to easy idiomatization and extension to many metaphors.

word choice - "One half" vs "a half"

I'm working on a copy editing project and in the copy they use

...only nine and one-half kilometres long...

I have decided the hyphen is wrong. However one half sounds awkward to me. Is that just because of usage? So I'm wondering: are both nine and one half and nine and a half correct? Or is one more formal? In the end, which is preferred?

Is this sentence correct? Present Perfect for finished past

Is this sentence correct?

"Post-Soviet Russia has long hesitated before definitively recognizing the frontiers with its new neighbors"

The recognition comes after the hesitation; therefore, the time period for the latter is finished. Plus Russia has NOT been hesitating for some time now.

Isn't it better to say:

"Post-Soviet Russia had long hesitated before definitively recognizing the frontiers with its new neighbors"?

OR

"Post-Soviet Russia hesitated for a long time before definitively recognizing the frontiers with its new neighbors"

backshifting - Use of IS and WAS in reported speech

Which one is more correct:

Melissa said she was going to the mall.

or

Melissa said she is going to the mall.

word usage - Which is more affirmative: "I think" or "I guess"?

In South Asia, we tend to use "I think" when we are almost sure about something; or sometimes use it ironically like in example "I think you should have done this yesterday".
"I guess", on the other hand, is used when the person is not sure himself like in "I guess you come here often".

Now as I talked to some North American people, I noticed that they use the two terms oppositely. That is, "I guess" when they are almost sure and "I think" when not. So I want to know which is the correct way to use these terms? Or are they just equivalent?

Answer

The difference is a qualitative one, not quantitative describing probability.

It varies by context, but typically, "I think" indicates that you're basing what you're about to say based primarily on knowledge, thought or experiences you had before the current situation, whereas "I guess" indicates that you're doing on-the-spot speculation at that moment. The presence of either word doesn't indicate a level of certainty (this is given by context, including the tone in which it is spoken.)

Example:

A: I need to go home soon. It's 11 PM now, when does the last train leave?
B: I think it's at 10 PM. Let me check. Yeah, 10 PM. I guess you have to call a cab.

B uses "I think" because he's recalling information he had before, and uses "I guess" when he's doing an on-the-spot appraisal of the current situation.

pronouns - What is blocking a deictic use of 'it' in this example?

Consider the following exchange:

[1] Q: Is your name Jane?
     Aa: ^*Yes, it's right.
     Ab: Yes, that's right.

Note that [1Aa] is simply not acceptable. It's not just that that is preferred to it; it's rather that, in Standard English, it simply cannot be used here.

Why not?

Yes, in the replies [1A], the reference is clearly (supposed to be) deictic rather than anaphoric (see below); and the characteristic usage of 3rd person personal pronouns he/she/it/they is anaphoric. But they certainly can function deictically at least sometimes; CGEL gives the following example (p. 1469): Isn't she lovely! (uttered while looking at someone's baby).

So why is [1Aa] completely unacceptable, rather than just being less favored than [1Ab]?

I am well aware that Yes, it is would be completely acceptable... and I do understand why it would be. But [1Aa] is not, and my question is specifically about why it is not.

Some background on deixis

[1Ab] is a clear example of deictic use of that, very much like the [27ii] example from CGEL (p. 1461):

[27] i A: Kim has been falsifying the accounts. B: That's
terrible. [anaphoric]
     ii A: Kim

has been falsifying the accounts. B: That's a lie.
[discourse-deictic]

In [i] A's utterance is the antecedent for B's that, which refers to
the situation that A has described. But in [ii] that refers to A's
speech act, to a linguistic entity in the prior discourse.

grammar - Plural / Singular verb in this sentence?

Recently an editor just changed the plural verbs in my essay to singular ones, but I don't understand why he did so. Please see below:

(Original sentence)
After rising to power through multiple revolutions, the Chinese Communist Party holds a subversive notion and ideology that not only aspire to break the old world, but also aim to build a new one.

(revised sentence)
After rising to power through multiple revolutions, the Chinese Communist Party holds a subversive notion and ideology that not only aspires to break the old world, but also aims to build a new one.

In my understanding, there are two nouns in "a subversive notion and ideology", and that should be followed by a plural verb?

Answer

The key is in the use of the indefinite article.

To paraphrase:

The CPP holds a ^{subversive notion and ideology} that aspires . . .

I have put the subject in superscript in order to set it off from the rest of the text. Especially because of the a, the syntax treats the phrase as a compound single subject.

It is the same idea as:

This ^{fish and chips} is delicious.

Although there are actually two separate things joined together, they are thought of, and treated as, a singular item.

---

In order for the syntax to show that there are multiple things being used as individual subjects, you would need to remove the indefinite article and pluralize the subjects:

The CPP holds subversive notions and ideologies that aspire . . .

Alternatively, it's possible to use a phrasing similar to what follows—but it would be somewhat awkward:

The CPP holds a subversive notion as well as a subversive ideology that both aspire . . .

hyphenation - When to use -, – and —?

This is about hyphens (-), en-dashes (–) and em-dashes (—).

When to use which one? To be honest, I always use em-dashes unless I join words with a hyphen, but I never use an en-dash.

quite pretty, rather pretty, very pretty in British English and American English

I have a feeling that "quite pretty" doesn't have exactly the same meaning in British English and American English. For instance, in American English, "She's quite pretty" is considered as a compliment, and is close in meaning with "She's very pretty", whereas in British English, "She's quite pretty" has more or less the meaning of "She's rather pretty", "She's okay", but not "very pretty", which means that "quite pretty" is not "quite a compliment" in British English. What do British and American native speakers think? What would an Austalian or a Canadian think?

adjectives - How should "Northern Europe" be capitalized?

Europe should obviously be capitalized, since it is a proper noun. Should the northern part of the example sentence "I was traveling through northern Europe." be capitalized?

In country names such as North Holland, north is actually part of the name and not an adjective, and should therefore be capitalized.

However, in this case, there is no part of Europe officially named "Northern Europe", but is instead just used as a general (and varied, depending on you count them) list of countries roughly situated towards the north. What are the rules for capitalization in such a case?

punctuation - Using slash (/) as an abbreviation

As far as I know, a period is commonly used for an abbreviation (e.g., Feb., Mon., Inc.). But I can also see a slash in these cases: w/, w/o.

Is there any grammar rule for an abbreviation? or is latter case an exception?

Answer

There are a dozen or so "abbreviations" which employ the "/" character and which are generally recognized in US English. A few that come to mind:

• w/o -- without


• w/ -- with (probably derived from "w/o")


• o/t -- overtime



• N/A -- not applicable (or "not available", and several others)


• w/r/t -- with regard to

(And there are no doubt hundreds if not thousands of such abbreviations used in individual disciplines such as medicine or electronics.)

Note that while some a most commonly lower case, others usually are upper case, and this may vary from one writer or context to the next.

The "/" character is also generally recognized as a shorthand for "or" separating a pair of options, as in "The person who insists on always using the properly-gendered personal pronoun will often find his/her efforts stymied by a lack of information."

Usually the "/" character is used without spaces between it and adjacent components, but in cases where one side is "exposed", such as "w/" for "with" (vs "without"), there should be a separating space.

This sort of abbreviation is used so rarely (and often in technical contexts) that it's difficult to define how "formal" it is.

parentheses - Use of brackets in legal writing

I see in legal writing the use of double brackets in a quote to indicate part of the quote is deleted, such as: "All work [] makes Johnny a very dull boy." I thought the correct way to do this quote would have been "All work ... makes Johnny a very dull boy." Could you tell me when the brackets with no words between them is used correctly? Thanks.

quotation marks - What punctuation symbols mean "not in the full sense of the referenced phrase?"

This strip of Dinosaur Comics made me wonder whether it is appropriate to use quotation marks (in the terms of the comic) "as a not in the full sense of the word" lingual marker.

Searching Google, I found a Daily Writing Tips blog entry that indicates quotation marks can express irony. The Wikipedia article on "Irony Punctuation", however, indicates that no standard way to denote irony or sarcasm in English. It mentions "scare quotes," which seem to be closest to meaning that the word or phrase was not intended to have its full meaning, but scare quotes carry the risk of ambiguity - how do you distinguish between a properly quoted phrase and a phrase that means something differently?

Is there an established, unambiguous punctuation that suggests that the enclosed or referenced phrase does not have its full meaning?

grammatical number - Plural forms which end in -x such as tableaux

Words borrowed from French and ending in -eau originally had plural forms which appended an -x rather than an -s. For e.g., the plurals of tableau, beau, and plateau were tableaux, beaux, and plateaux respectively. While the use of plateaux and beaux has petered out in favour of plateaus and beaus, tableaux has not.

My questions:

1. How are these -x plural forms pronounced?


2. Is there any particular reason why tableaux is still the preferred plural form unlike plateaux, beaux, and portmanteaux?

Answer

The OED attests as occurring in English texts the following irregular -x noun plurals:

• aboideau > aboideaux


• bandeau > bandeaux


• bateau > bateaux


• bayou > bayoux


• beau > beaux


• bijou > bijoux


• bordereau > bordereaux



• bureau > bureaux


• château > châteaux


• chou > choux


• damoiseau > damoiseaux


• fabliau > fabliaux


• fricandeau > fricandeaux


• jeu > jeux


• lambeau > lambeaux


• maquereau > maquereaux


• morceau > morceaux



• Pineau > Pineaux


• plateau > plateaux


• portmanteau > portmanteaux


• procès verbal > procès verbaux


• réseau > réseaux


• rouleau > rouleaux


• seau > seaux


• tableau > tableaux


• taureau > taureaux


• torteau > torteaux



• Tourangeau > Tourangeaux


• trumeau > trumeaux


• vœu > vœux

Most of those are far too rare to be considered anything other than unassimilated, but of those that aren’t, the Ngrams do not bear out the OP’s assertion that the -x forms have fallen by the wayside. In fact, only the very oldest ones have been superseded by -s forms.

---

In the following Ngrams, the -x spelling is in blue and the -s spelling is in red. Notice how the blue nearly always dominates.

---

That one is interesting because it is one of the few that shows a distinct difference depending on whether the “British” or “American” corpus has been selected.

British plateaux vs plateaus

American plateaux vs plateaus

Only the French loanwords that have been around longest, and used the most, have lost their irregular inflection. Indeed, one of the very oldest, chapeau is even unattested in the chapeaux form.

On the other hand, words that require special treatment, like châteaux or nouveaux arrivés, can be expected to retain their imported forms longer. It may also be that people who know to use the import as an import, also know to import its irregularity: notice how
vœux, voeux, and voues all occur, but never
vœus. In the same way, there are no instances of châteaus, since if they know enough to hat the a, they surely know enough to -x the plural.

ordinals - How can I ask a question with the answer "I'm eating the fourth apple"?

Assume that there are 5 apples must be eaten by Jack. When you want to know about how many of the apples are eaten, you may ask Jack, 'how many apples have you eaten?'; But how can I ask the question to make Jack answers, 'I'm eating the fourth apple'?

word choice - "Him" or "his" used with "resulted"

Which sentence is more grammatically correct:

Jack’s predilection toward competitive sports resulted in him becoming a great tennis player.

or

Jack's predilection toward competitive sports resulted in his becoming a great tennis player.

gender - How to explicitly specify non-binary support when using pronouns?

My native language uses the equivalent of he/his as the default gender-less pronoun. When using English (as a second language) most people use "he/she" or "him/her" to indicate a person of unknown/unspecified gender. E.g.:

He/she must join the team by the end of this year.

I am aware that singular they does the trick, but I am interested in a form that explicitly acknowledge non-binary genders. Something like “he/she/*”, where * allows for anything else.

Question: How to explicitly specify non-binary support when using pronouns?

Answer

Any non-binary person I've known is happy with the usage of singular "they" which you mention. This is inclusive of non-binary people. It is admittedly not a list of alternatives with one specifically for non-binary people, but that is OK.

grammar - Does the tense in that clause need to agree with the main clause?

I don't know if the title of this question is accurate or not. My vacabulary of grammar is very limited. May you could understand me by the following example:

1. She told me that the earth is moving around the sun.




2. She told me that the earth was moving around the sun.

Which one is correct? Should the tense in that clause always agree with the tense in main clause?

grammaticality - Which are right choices in: “Can you imagine him/his forgetting his own birthday?”

Which one of the following is correct?

1. Can you imagine his forgetting his own birthday?


2. Can you imagine him forgetting his own birthday?

The question was asked in SNAP 2009 and I can't understand why they said that the only right answer is option 1.

I hear people saying 2 all the time, and I read it that way often enough, so what’s supposed to be wrong with option 2?

Or is the test itself wrong?

conditionals - I would have felt that I was or were?

I'm not sure whether to use the past tense or the conditional in this construction below.

I found the answers to the exam, but I didn't look at them because I
would have felt that I was (or were?) cheating.

Is it 'were' because it's an unreal conditional? Or is it not an unreal conditional?

punctuation - 13 Month Old or 13-Month-Old?

I have just installed Grammarly and it showed up something which i am not sure of.

It corrected '13 month old' to '13-month-old'.

The context is

I ask because my 13-month-old God daughter seemed like she was a little resentful towards another child who was visiting at the same time.

Which would be correct, and why?

grammaticality - Is "... his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her peasants and also her immediate family a miserable life." correct?

His early youth was spent on a country estate where he was able to observe the life of the
serfs and the relations between master and serf at their worst: his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her
peasants and also her immediate family a miserable life.

The sentence comes from Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature. Is the sentence correct? Can you lead somebody a miserable life? Or is lead used in the sentence as a verb that is pronounced /lɛd/?

Answer

… his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her peasants and also her immediate family a miserable life.

In idiomatic Present Day English, lead (past led) is not a ditransitive verb, i.e., one which takes two objects, like elected her president or gave me a lecture.

Curiously enough, this has not always been the case:

… if he behave himself well; but, if otherwise, they lead him a Life (as they say) like a Dog.— Roger North, The Life of the Honourable Sir Dudley North, 1744.

But Nabokov’s lectures were published in 1981.

What is missing is a causative — the tyrannical mother caused them to lead a miserable life – or a resultative — the mother made their lives miserable.

The easiest way to edit the clause would be to add a dependent infinitive:

… his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her peasants and also her immediate family to suffer a miserable life.

I wonder whether something like this was somehow omitted.

I could not readily find any details about Nabokov’s role in the publication of this book beyond his having given the lectures himself at various American universities. A New York Times review at the time of publication notes:

Fredson Bowers, who edited both volumes, says Nabokov's lectures were mainly handwritten. Sometimes they lacked clear organization, and parts remained in rough notes.

Whatever the case, a proofreader at the publishing house certainly should have caught the error.

Adjective preceding attributive nouns

When an adjective is preceding two nouns, the first one being an attributive noun, does it define the final noun or the attributive noun?

For example: Red car keys

Are they red keys that open a car, or are they keys that open a red car?

Answer

Strictly speaking, the meaning is ambiguous in your example phrase.

It's more common in this case to think of the first noun as modifying everything that follows (red keys that open a car), and I doubt that somebody would actually interpret it the other way (keys that open a red car).

So, at least here, I don't think ambiguity would be a practical concern. But it might be with other constructions.

---

Context can determine meaning:

Jimmy's only car was yellow. He liked to put his red car keys in a cookie jar on his kitchen counter.

Here, the surrounding text makes it clear that it's Jimmy's car keys that are red and not his car.

---

Hyphenation can also be used to avoid ambiguity if the meaning is not made obvious from context:

Jimmy grabbed his red car-keys.
Jimmy grabbed his red-car keys.

At least in this case, however, I would say that even though the meaning is now clear, the sentences look strange. It's not normal to see either car-keys or red-car in this kind of construction.

---

If context doesn't clear up the ambiguity, and hyphenation isn't a good style choice, then the only other option is to rephrase:

Jimmy grabbed the red keys to his car from the kitchen counter.
Jimmy grabbed the keys to his red car from the kitchen counter.

grammatical number - What is the proper title abbreviation for addressing multiple people?

I'm writing a letter to several recipients in the same document and want to address them correctly at the start.

Is the following correct (I suspect not) and if not, what should it be:

Dear Mr's Jones, Smith, Bloggs and Flintstone

Answer

The plural form of Mister is Misters, and the abbreviations Mr. and Messrs. respectively (although UK English drops the periods). The odd spelling is because "Messrs." comes from the French "messieurs". So your example would be phrased as:

Dear Messrs. Jones, Smith, Bloggs, and Flintstone

Ms. is a bit more complicated; any of "Mses.", "Mss.", or "Mmes." (from the French "mesdames") are acceptable. If you use one of these, be consistent and don't randomly change to another form.

If it's mixed between two genders, use the appropriate honorific for each set and join them with "and". So for instance:

Dear Ms. Smith and Messrs. Jones, Bloggs, and Flintstone

For addressing a married couple with the same surname, a variant may be employed.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith

grammar - How to Highlight Words with Quotation Marks?

When we highlight words with quotation marks, should the periods and commas be within or outside of them?

Examples:

Question 1

A) He is such a "good guy."

or

B) He is such a "good guy".

Question 2

A) This smartphone is the "smartest," you should get it.

or

B) This smartphone is the "smartest", you should get it.

If possible, kindly explain why are you picking those choices.

Thank you.

How do you answer tag questions with ", right?"?

When you asked "You don't love me, right?":
Which word is used to answer, "Right." or "Yes."?

If the answer is "Right":

--> Does "Right" mean "What you said is right, i.e., I don't love you.", doesn't it?

If the answer is "Yes":

--> Which does "Yes" mean, "Yes, what you said is right." or "Yes, I love you."?

possessives and number (sing./pl)

I'm revising a text containing these two sentences:

a) Students’ sex was coded by using their first names.

b) Students’
birthday was self-reported in the survey.

I'm sure the correct version should have "students' birthdays" because the rule in English is to use the plural for the possessed objects, even if the possessors only have one each.

But if I apply this logic to sentence a) about sex, I get
"students' sexes" ...
which seems ridiculous. Why? They are both potentially plural, yet each student has only one sex, and one birthday.

I wonder if the parameter "sex" has only a superficial resemblance to the parameter "birthday". Have you any ideas? Many thanks.

grammar - How often do you go to "the" or "a" dentist?

I answered the below question and got it wrong. I wonder why? It was a fill in the blank type question.

How often do you go to ______ dentist?

I wrote "How often do you go to a dentist?" The correct answer is "How often do you go to the dentist?" I have never been to the same dentist in my life. I have only been to the dentist five times and each time is a different one.

Why is "a" wrong?

Word order: phrasal verb plus adverb

I'm dubious about word order in a situation of adverb plus phrasal verb. My specific question is the following. I want to refer to an article that deals with a certain topic. That topic is not the only one covered in the article but it is the most important one.

Which of these sentences is correct?

Your article deals mainly with [TOPIC].

Your article mainly deals with [TOPIC].

Your article deals with, mainly, [TOPIC].

Your article deals with [TOPIC], mainly.

Mainly, your article deals with [TOPIC].

As a non-native speaker, all this sentences (except the second) sound more or less fine to me. Nevertheless, I'm not completely sure about their correctness. Feel free to add some more options. And please, comment about the placing of commas as I may be fooled by my mother tongue intuition(Spanish).

Thanks!

Answer

I (as a native speaker) agree with all your judgements, including your placement of commas. I suspect that "mainly" works like "only", which McCawley discusses in his textbook The Syntactic Phenomena of English. "Only" has a scope and a focus, the latter being compared or contrasted with something else (usually given special stress in the pronunciation) in that same scope. "Only" often does not occur next to its focus, but does occur within its scope, and is subject to the constraint that it immediately precede a constituent that contains the focus.

For instance, in "I only like beer that has been chilled," the scope is the entire sentence, and "only" prefixes the verb phrase "like beer that has been chilled" which contains the focus "chilled". Since the focus is also within the constituent "beer that has been chilled", "only" could have alternatively been placed before "beer".

Replace "only" in the above example with "mainly" to see the parallel.

There are complexities here which I don't understand, and I remember McCawley's description only foggily.

grammar - Infinitive without "to"?

Today I found this headline on bbc.co.uk

How one family is helping their son win the fight.

which made me wonder when exactly it is allowed to omit the to.

Apostrophe usage?

I've written:

Special offer: For a limited period (to celebrate the launch of our
saunas in Chalet Harriet 1 & 2) we are offering our free children's
discounts on both chalets for 15th December and 22nd December.

I particularly want to know if it's "childrens" or "children's" (with or without the apostrophe) and if the brackets above work? Thanks

possessives - A friend of Jane and Tom or A friend of Jane and Tom's?

We can say:

She's a friend of mine.

She's a friend of Tom's.

She's a friend of my parents'.

But today I saw this: She's a friend of Jane and Tom.

Is it correct? Or should it be: She's a friend of Jane and Tom's?

Answer

The grammatical form of the sentence you indicate is certainly

She is a friend of Jane and Tom's.

meaning that they both know her and are her friends. However, particularly when speaking, the final "s" happens to be overlooked.

With reference to Jay's answer, the option She's a friend of Jane's and Tom's indicates that they are both friends to this girl/woman, but they do not necessarily know each other.

When to use indefinite article before "independence"?

I got this confusion with a particular English grammar: when to say an independence. Like: as children mature, they develop an independence. (Actually...I don't think "an" is even necessary for "independence" when we say "a sense of independence.")

Other times, it's doesn't sound right to use "an". Like: we fought for independence.

My book explains that "an independence" refers to a continuously changing state in that sentence. But in the second one, independence is a concrete state.

Can someone explain how "an independence" is a continuously changing state and more importantly when to use "an"?

commas - Punctuation with block-quotes

How do I properly place a comma after a big block-quote? Let's say I have a sentence like this:

The author states: < a big quote goes here. >, therefore...

Since my sentence continues after the quote, it is sometimes necessary to put a comma or some other punctuation mark after the quote. However, sometimes the quote is inserted as a big block of text that is formatted in a special way (like on this site). How do I do it in this case? The following doesn't really seem right to me:

• The author states:

  
  
  

  
  

  Some big quote

  
  
  
  

  goes here.

  
  

  
  
  

  , therefore...

Answer

You can see just in this forum that sentences are not generally continued after block quotes.

However, it is explicitly stated in the MLA style guide that the sentence preceding a long quote set off by indentation should end with a colon, that the quotation should end with a period, and that the next sentence should continue at the normal indentation after the quotation.

The following shows this...

This is a block quote:

Indent this, then end the sentence with a period.

Continue afterward with another sentence.

grammar - Exceptions that allow the use of "will" after "if"

This as what I've been able to establish:

The use of "will" after "if" is legal only when any of the following conditions apply:

1. The "will" is used as a verb (equivalent to "want"), for example, "If you will".


2. The "if" can be replaced with a "whether", for example, "I don't know if I will make it on time".

Is each of the two conditions above sufficient to make the use of "will" after "if" legal?

Are there any other cases that I've missed, which make the use of "will" after "if" legal?

meaning - Do "to infinitives" used with adjectives, such as "anxious", "unwilling", etc. indicate purpose?

"To infinitives" are often used as adjectives and adverbs to indicate purpose.

I have something to eat.

He came to play.

When we use "to infinitives" with adjectives like anxious and unwilling, are they said to indicate purpose, or do they indicate something else?

He was anxious to play.

He was unwilling to play.

This building is built to last.

Wikipedia's description says that "to infinitives" modify adjectives, but it doesn't say how it modifies the adjective. There seems to be a difference between a sentence like "he was unwilling to play" and "it is tall to reach fruit" in how the infinitives modifies, but if we say the infinitive in the first sentence does not indicate purpose, then I'm not sure what we would say it indicates. For example, when a "to infinitive" indicates purpose, it can be reworded to "in order to" or "for the purpose of" but I'm not sure how I would reword sentences like "he was anxious to play" or "he was unwilling to play."

pronunciation - Why is ‘i’ in milk pronounced differently from ‘i’ in find?

As far as I know, in words of the structure CVCC, the vowel is usually short. Examples include milk, front, clamp, wasp, sport, etc.

However, with some CC types, the vowel seems to always be long (kind, mind, old, climb), which surprises me. Why is there such a difference?

Is "Marco Polo" slang?

I have heard some people utter "Marco Polo" in distress or shocking cases. Is it slang? Or is it used as something else?
Can someone great as Marco Polo be used as an abusive word?

Answer

No, to my knowledge it is neither slang as such nor offensive in any way. One possibility is that Marco Polo is being used as a substitute for Motherfu..er. The rhythm is similar and Marco is close enough to Mother to give it a nice alliterative ring.

I have never heard it used this way and it is definitely neither offensive nor vulgar. However, if you have heard people use it as an expletive, they are probably using it because it is an alliteration of the other word. Think of it as an equivalent to words like darn or drat replacing damn.

How to determine if a pre-head dependent of a noun is a complement or a modifier

These examples are from CGEL*.

a linguistics student

a first-year student

CGEL says 'linguistics' is a complement of the noun 'student', whereas 'first-year' is a modifier of the noun 'student'.

How exactly do you determine the former is a complement and the latter is a modifier?

Also, in the following examples of my own choosing, are the words in bold complements or modifiers of the respective subsequent nouns? And how do you reach your conclusion?

a college student

a police station

a tax bill

*The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Pullum and Huddleston (p439)

meaning - Guess, second-guess, and higher-order guesses

I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between guess and second-guess.

From Merriam-Webster's:

guess means
1: to form an opinion of from little or no evidence
2: believe, suppose
3: to arrive at a correct conclusion about by conjecture, chance, or intuition

and

second-guess means
1: to criticize or question actions or decisions of (someone) often
after the results of those actions or decisions are known; also: to engage in such criticism of (an action or

decision)
2: to seek to
anticipate or predict

What's the difference between "to seek to anticipate or predict" and "to arrive at a correct conclusion about (a future event) by conjecture, chance, or intuition"? If there's not much difference, why prefix "guess" by "second-"?

Or if the prefix "second-" indicates some kind of "theory-of-mind", then would the word "third-guess" be understood as "to seek to anticipate the anticipation of a person A by another person B", and similarly for higher order guesses?

Answer

The definition I'm more familiar with, and the one listed first by ODO is:

second-guess [WITH OBJECT]

1 Anticipate or predict (someone’s [or some body's] actions or
thoughts) by guesswork:
he had to second-guess what the environmental regulations would be in five years' time

This restricts the guessing to what others are considering doing / going to do.

I'm not sure that M-W is correct in not adding this restriction; certainly I'd only use 'second-guess' in the way OALD defines it. The criticism sense is largely American.

terminology - What is the difference between a phrase and a clause?

What is the difference between a phrase and a clause? I tried looking this in dictionary but can not identify the difference. It would be great if I could get an example and formula of what makes a phrase and a clause.

Answer

The short answer: clauses contain a subject and its verb, while phrases do not. Note that phrases may contain nouns and verbals, but won't have the noun as the verb's actor.

The long answer: see this page from the University of Chicago which has several examples.

terminology - Is there a name for the set of possible ***direct*** answers to a question?

For example, the set for the question "did you go to the store?" would be {'yes','no'} but not include '7', and for "how old are you?" would be the set of positive integers but not include 'by car', and for "how did you get here" would include 'by car' but not 'Jupiter' , and so on.

An indirect answer might challenge the question. For example, the direct answers to "have you stopped beating your wife?" would be 'yes' or 'no', but hopefully neither is correct, so you would challenge the question by saying "I never beat my wife". Hopefully this is the correct answer, but you have to go meta to give it.

Also, are there other, correct terms for what I called "direct" and "indirect" answers?

Thanks

word choice - "I am him" vs "I am he"

A: "Cablegram for Mr.Smith"

B: "I am him."

B: "I mean, I am he."

Why the correction? What difference does it make?

Similarly: "I am not her" / "I am not she"?

Answer

Him and her are the objective case forms of the pronouns he and she, respectively. The objective case is used nearly exclusively for direct and indirect objects, objects of prepositions, and objective complements. In the sentence I am him, the pronoun is functioning as a predicate nominative, so it must be in the nominative case; hence, it takes its nominative form, he.

Dependent clause w/list *comma or semicolon* followed by independent clause

Should we use a semicolon or comma when an adverbial dependent clause containing a list is followed by an independent clause?

While not everyone is a Newton, Einstein, or Hawking, every one of them is a fascinating character with a unique story.

or:

While not everyone is a Newton, Einstein, or Hawking; every one of them is a fascinating character with a unique story.