hyphenation - Is it Game time or game-time?

I'm trying to verify the correctness the following sentence:

Game time is Sunday.

Is it correct or should it be "game-time"?

'An' or 'a' when followed by information between commas

In the following sentence, I'm unsure whether to use ‘an’ or ‘a’.

..primarily meant as a, albeit large, donation.

On the one hand ‘an’ sounds more appropriate when read, as the vowel beginning to ‘albeit’ suggests.
Alternatively, one might say ‘a’ is correct; is a sentence not supposed to make perfect sense with the word between the commas removed. If so, it must be just an ‘a’.

I'm tilting towards the latter, even though it sounds odd. Please enlighten me.

Answer

Are you stuck with this very awkward sentence construction? Since you are questioning what article to use, I suspect you are not. Therefore, I suggest that you change the sentence construction:

     ....primarily meant as a donation, albeit a large one.

That gets you around all of your problems.

What is the part of speech for words suffixed with "ity"?

This may be a dumb question, but I am bad at grammar (software engineer).

Example: practical becomes practicality, equal becomes equality

The dictionary calls them nouns, but nouns are defined as

A word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things (common noun), or to name a particular one of these (proper noun).

What is confusing is that, by the above definition, the word practicality should be able to "identify any of a class of people, places, or things". So, what class of people, places, or things does "practicality" identify? What if people within that class aren't always practical?

What part of speech do these words fall into?

BONUS: is there such a version of the word empirical?

Answer

More specifically than being just nouns, nouns that are derived from adjectives by various different suffixes (-ness, -(i)ty, -(t/s)ion, -hood, -(e)ry, etc.) are known as abstract nouns, in that they refer to an entity that is not concrete or, as you yourself said in your comment, are not “a person, place, or thing”.

There are also abstract nouns that are not derived. Many of them, in fact. It is a fairly generic word class. When creating nouns by nominalising a verb gerund—i.e., taking the gerund running and using it as a noun, as in the phrase in the running—they usually become abstract nouns. There are exceptions (a winning is a concrete noun, as in the plural, one’s winnings), or cases where the resulting noun can be either depending on meaning (like a cutting from a newspaper, which is a concrete noun, as opposed to the cutting of a birthday cake); but most are abstract.

As regards your bonus question, the only abstract noun derived from the adjective empirical is empiricalness. Empiricality, while regularly formed, quite easily understood, and occasionally used (about 50,000 hits on Google), has not been picked up by any dictionaries and would probably be considered non-standard by most.

grammatical number - Seasonal parsing: "enjoying Re-run's of Christmas' past" — fragment, pluralization and ownership

enjoying Re-run's of Christmas' past

I just saw this posted as a Facebook status update, and it has boggled me as to how it should be considered or how it should be rewritten. If re-runs belong to Christmases of the past, and if the past owns Christmases then there is ownership present. What about Christmases' ?

I'm not focused on the fact it's a fragment of speech. Maybe that imbues some ambiguity upon it in my mind's eye and prevents me immediate resolution.

What's the most accurate, or else, your best interpretation of this fragment?

Answer

The "of" takes care of possession, if in fact possession is intended. The re-runs belong to Christmases past, or the writer is experiencing re-runs of the past Christmases themselves. Either way, I see the solution as simple plurals for both. The possession is in the eye of the beholder.

Enjoying re-runs of Christmases past

Or more poetically:

Enjoying re-runs of Christmas past

If TV is the subject, maybe you can convince your Facebook friend to decrease the ambiguity with something like:

Enjoying old Christmas re-runs

Most people on Facebook appreciate this kind of constructive criticism.

saxon genitive - Apostrophes in a list of people

Imagine that a boat belonged to three separate people, who each paid an equal share for the boat. Which one is correct?

1. "That is Kyle, Joey, and Mark's boat."




2. "That is Kyle's, Joey's, and Mark's boat."

I am oversimplifying the issue for the purpose of clarification, so I understand that in the example I could easily say "That boat belongs to Kyle, Joey, and Mark." What I am actually writing is a lot more complicated, so I am looking simply for the answer of the apostrophe issue in the hypothetical situation above.

Answer

If the boat is posssessed equally by the three, you only need put the apostrophe on the last person's name.

E.g., John, Jacob, and Mary's boat.

The possessive, in a list, on the last person shows collective possession of the group.

grammatical case - Whoever vs whomever in "you could become whomever and whatever you wanted to be"

I think I noticed a mistake in Ready Player One:

In the OASIS, you could become whomever and whatever you wanted to be, without ever revealing your true identity, because your anonymity was guaranteed.

It’s supposed to be whoever right?

Answer

It's not actually clear whether "whomever" is a mistake here.

The relevant matrix clause breaks down like this:

You could become [whomever and whatever you wanted to be]

Here, [whomever and whatever you wanted to be] is a predicative complement.

In the embedded clause, "whomever and whatever" serves as the (fronted) predicative complement of "to be".

Here we run into a problem. "To be" is a non-finite form (it's the "to-infinitive"). In certain contexts, a to-infinitive may have a subject that takes "exceptional case-marking". For example, in the sentence "I wanted him to be my friend", "him" is marked for the accusative case even though it is the subject of the infinitive "to be". "Traditional" prescriptive grammarians seem to be in agreement that in a context like this, the predicate noun phrase associated with the to-infinitive is also supposed to be in the accusative, so for example, it would be "correct" to say "He said he would be whomever I wanted him to be".

But as far as I know, there is no consensus in "traditional" grammar about the "correct" case of "X" in a clause like "you wanted to be X". There seem to be two views: one is in favor of the nominative, because the (implied) subject of "to be" refers to the same person as the nominative pronoun "you". The other view is that there is an "implied" accusative subject (something like "you wanted yourself to be X") which means that the predicate noun phrase "X" should be in the accusative case. See Peter Shor's answer to my question “Being [he/him] is not easy.” Which is prescriptively “correct”?; Shor cites Reed and Kellogg (1878), who say that "I wish to be him—equalling I wish (me or myself) to be him—is the proper form" (p. 182). In contrast, Josephine Turck Baker (whom I cite in my question), says that "the pronouns I, he, she, we, they follow to be when to be is not preceded by a noun or a pronoun", and gives examples like "I should like to be she" (Correct English, Vol 21, 1920).

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In fact, the actual distinction in usage between "whoever" and "whomever" is highly confused and unclear in modern English, so even if the "traditional" sources were unanimous it would be a bit difficult to say what is "supposed" to be the case.

Here are some possible explanations for the use of the "accusative" form whomever here:

1. "Hypercorrection." I don't actually understand the precise definition of this term; some people seem to use it with a fairly broad sense, but others seem to have a much narrower definition. In any case, this could be characterized as a kind of "mistake": it's where a form associated with more elevated language is used in an "incorrect" context, without following any particular rule.





2. Grammatical variation between Standard English speakers. If this is the cause, the use of "whomever" would not be categorized as a "mistake" by a linguist, although many speakers might call it a mistake regardless. I suppose it would not be entirely surprising if people don't all have the same grammatical intuitions about the use of rarely used words like "whomever". In this case, the use of "whomever" might be licensed in some dialects because "whomever and whoever" does not serve as the subject of the internal clause (that role is taken by "you").

grammar - Present perfect for past action with present effect

If I seem tired, can I say: "I haven't slept last night"? If not, why have I been told that we use present perfect for actions that have present effects?

Answer

Why have I been told that we use present perfect for actions that have present effects? Because the present perfect is indeed an appropriate way to talk about a past action whose effects continue into the present. Examples:

• I've bought an iPhone (want to see it?)



• I've lost my keys (can you help me look for them?)


• I've made a cake (would you like a piece?)

However, as soon as you use an expression of finished time, then the past simple must be used:

• I bought an iPhone last week (want to see it?)


• I made a cake before leaving for work this morning (would you like a piece?)

The past simple is needed also when the finished time is not explicitly stated but implied:

• I bought an iPhone in Tokyo (want to see it?) [You are back in London after your trip to Japan.]


• I lost my keys while cleaning the basement (can you help me look for them?) [You are no longer cleaning the basement.]

"Rules" such as the one discussed here can be quite helpful to get English language learners started on the differences between English tenses, but good teachers will make it clear from the outset that actual usage is very much more complex.