grammar - General rules for identifying conditional sentences?

I am trying to identify the subject and object in the following sentence:

Come to me, and I'll give you a fight you'll never forget

At first, it appeared as if whenever a conjunction appears after a clause, and there's a future tense verb in the following clause, then it's a conditional sentence. My major problem here is whether this is a valid conditional sentence. Here, the speaker is actually saying

I'm an interesting fighter

and not typically providing a condition for a result. I am trying to find out if there's any general rule for identifying a real conditional sentence. Could the rule that applies to this sentence be classified as one for identifying idioms? Thanks.

Answer

The first statement is conditional, and the second statement is not. The two sentences you have provided are not the same.

The first statement says, quite literally, that if you come, then I will give you a fight you will never forget. That is definitively conditional, as the speaker will only give the reader a "fight [he/she] will never forget" if the reader shows up.

The statement may imply that the speaker considers himself an interesting fighter, but that is a mere implication – it is not what the statement is literally saying. Conditional sentences are defined by their literal meaning and their structure, not by the implications behind the statements.

punctuation - Spaces and em-dash

In using the em-dash, where do you put the spaces? Which of the following is correct?

School is based on the three R’s —reading, writing, and ’rithemtic.

or

School is based on the three R’s— reading, writing, and ’rithemtic.

or

School is based on the three R’s — reading, writing, and ’rithemtic.

Answer

If we can trust Grammar Girl's thoroughness of search, then her advice is sound:

Every style guide I checked, except the AP Stylebook, stated there
should be no spaces between an em-dash and the adjacent words. That
means it is a style choice. If you're writing for a newspaper,
magazine, or website that uses Associated Press style, put in the
spaces. Otherwise, leave them out.

So:

School is based on the three R’s—reading, writing, and ’rithemtic.

That said, em dashes are often substituted with en dashes in British English, and these are spaced when used parenthetically:

School is based on the three R’s – reading, writing, and ’rithemtic

(Also, some British English guides are more or less strict about the use of the serial comma – the above sentence may be seen as: "[...] reading, writing and ’rithemtic").

phrase usage - This means that or This means

I'm currently reworking my technical report and was wondering which of the following wordings is correct. If both are correct, which one is the better one?

This means that the behavior of the cmd.exe is accessible [...].

This means the behavior of the cmd.exe is accesible [...].

Answer

Both are correct. I'd usually go for the first one because it's clearer, the brain has less work to do to parse the sentence. It could depend on the rest of the sentence though; if you have fifty thousand "that"s you might want to take a few out to improve the flow, or restructure the sentence entirely.

hyphenation - Hyphens in verb construction containing prefix such as "re"

In semi-formal business writing in the United States, I often observe that writers tend to add a hyphen between a prefix and the root infinitive of verbs. In many of the cases, the resulting verb either does not appear in the dictionary at all, with or without the hyphen; or it does appear, but does not contain the hyphen.

It seems to me that the reason why we tend to insert the hyphen is because the verb, taken as a whole with its prefix, seems unnatural; so adding a hyphen is a syntactical decoration that has a similar effect to adding quotation marks around an unfamiliar word, or an invented word. The person must be thinking in their head, "Let's take this ordinary word that everyone understands, and tack on a prefix that everyone also understands... oh, wait, that sounds weird. Is that even a word? Hmm, probably not... well, I'll put a hyphen in here so that people can clearly separate the prefix from the verb and, by mentally putting the two together, understand the meaning."

Some examples:

• "Re-opened" — All the dictionaries I could find (online, at least) give the infinitive "reopen", and some of them actually conjugate it as "reopened" in the examples.


• "Re-tested" — I could find a few dictionaries that give the infinitive "retest", but none that specify "re-tested" as a conjugation. The only dictionary I could find with this infinitive was thefreedictionary.com; MW doesn't have it.

Another popular prefix is "un-", but that can often be substituted with an antonym; for example "undeployed" could become "removed" or "reverted deployment of...".

My questions/remarks about this tendency are as follows:

• Obviously, if an authoritative dictionary of the English language lists the infinitive with the prefix but without a hyphen, it is an error to add a hyphen, either to the infinitive or to any conjugation. Correct?


• If an authoritative dictionary does not list the infinitive with the desired prefix at all, and the writer wants to use the prefix with that infinitive anyway, is it more appropriate to include a hyphen or to omit it? This question is important because many business and technical scenarios require the application of unconventional prefixes to infinitives. The meaning of these words is often understood very intuitively by insular "in-groups" of readers who are colleagues and use these terms as jargon in a particular field of discourse.


• Other than quoting the dictionary, are there any more abstract rules of the English language that I could cite to justify including (or not including) a hyphen in these cases? I am especially interested in rules that would explain, to those who think the hyphen belongs there, why it does not. If there is a general case rule that would apply to most or all cases of tacking on prefixes to existing infinitives, that would be ideal.


• While I prefer avoiding these problems whenever possible, by using appropriate antonyms for "un-" and appropriate repetition words for "re-", sometimes it is necessary to apply a prefix and create a jargon term, or write down a jargon term that is completely entrenched in the verbal usage of a large population.

Answer

Usually you can just slap re on the front of a word, without a hyphen, and you will be understood. There’s no need for the term to have made its way into an “authoritative” dictionary, even if there were such a thing.

There are circumstances in which the hyphen is desirable:

• if your new word with re collides with an established “re” word which has a different sense. Two of the words Carlo_R mentions are of this sort: resign and reserve.


• If you want to draw attention to the fact that you are using a “re” word in a different sense than that which would be expected, particularly if you are reverting to the base sense. “D.W.Griffith’s re-construction of the myth of the carpetbagger.”


• If you want to emphasize that you are repeating or reversing an action. “Burns opened an interesting question in 1923; but it has been completely neglected and I want to re-open it now.”

I sometimes intrude a hyphen when the word to which I’m attaching re begins with a vowel, to prevent even momentary confusion; but it’s probably not necessary.

grammaticality - Apostrophe for words ending with the letter S

I always had this difficulty understanding how to depict possessive nature for words ending with s.

For example: Is it correct to say, "James's heart is made of gold"? Or is there any other way to use apostrophes with words ending with S?

Answer

This is up to the writer's style, there are two options:

1) James's heart is made of gold.
2) James' heart is made of gold.

@jsegal the link you posted actually confirms this:

NOTE: Although names ending in s or an
s sound are not required to have the
second s added in possessive form, it
is preferred.

comparatives - Use of "more" with more than two items

Suppose we were to say that "California is one of the more pleasant states on the West Coast in terms of weather."

Is this grammatically incorrect because there are more than two states on the West Coast? Would I have to say that "California is one of the most pleasant states on the West Coast in terms of weather?"
I feel that the above sentence would somewhat change the intended meaning.
Thanks in advance!

punctuation - Can a word be contracted twice (e.g. "I'ven't")?

I've seen a contraction of two words. I can't see why it wouldn't've been possible to have been contracted twice. Is it possible and how should it be punctuated?

Update: Ok, to sum up the answers so far

• This appears in spoken British and American English


• It is from one of the lower registers of English


• Even if spoken this way sometimes, it isn't really written as a double contraction, except as written speech in fiction.


• And from my own googling in Wiktionary, it appears most written forms are old British words, often nautical like fo'c'sle.

Answer

This is not the highest register, but you may hear it in speech. Native speakers tend to slur words together and leave out sounds even if they wouldn't write that way.

Double contractions are not used in writing. They may be grammatically correct, but a professor would not allow you to use them in an essay. Typically, even single contractions are avoided in formal writing.