Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi Homer How about a session based on examples of business letters offering or accepting products, or arranging meetings. You'd need to know whether your students would be dealing with North American, British or other English-speaking clients. If various, you would probably get some interesting disc...

An apology, guys. If this last post of mine sounds as though I was completely unaware of most of what's gone before, you're right. I don't know what button I failed to press, but somehow I thought I was coming in somewhere on page two; and I found pp. 3-5 only when I came back into the site after cl...

May be it's an Australian thing, Harzer. I haven't noted it down, but I'm sure I've been hearing the singular verb used more and more where you and I would use the plural - and I'm talking about on the radio and TV, not in conversation. I'm also talking about wider contexts than "one of... ". Howeve...

As Andrew and Duncan will have gathered, my Polish is non-existent. I should have got Anna Wierzbicka's name right, though, as she is a Professor in Linguistics at the Australian National University only about 10k's from where I'm sitting at this moment. :roll: The book I was thinking of, Andrew , w...

I'm inclined to agree with Attila, Larry, namely that "This is my Dad" is like what you use in an introduction, and "That's Uncle Harry" is more like simple identification of the person across the room. With the introduction you're inviting a rather more intimate relationship. Or perhaps another way...

Hi metal I can't think of any way Australian English would use an infinitive after the verb 'resent'. We would always say: "He resented being interviewed ...", never "*He resented to be interviewed ...". Other varieties of English might follow a different practice, since grammatically it's not impos...

Maybe I missed your point, metal, and the answer is "He continued resenting the compulsion to complete Venn diagrams ....

Norm

You mean, metal, like "He resented being compelled to compose Venn diagrams for the rest of his natural life"???? What about these ones, Andrew: anticipated hearing (from you earlier) abandoned singing (folk songs five years ago) begrudged contributing (to his children's school) celebrated winning (...

Hi Andrew I’m not sure whether you’re interested in phrasal verbs that are more or less synonyms of the ones you’ve already listed; and I’m not sure how many items in the list below even conform to your definition of a gerund; but I simply let my imagination run a bit loose while I was watching the ...

metal56 The Oxford Dictionary gives "now" as an adverb, a conjunction and a noun. Is it possible that in the examples you offer it has more the effect of a conjunction (especially if associated with "since" or "as"); whereas if it were shifted next to the verb it would focus us more on the adverbial...

I was surprised to see that I'd written "This book is a good read" in my post. I'd meant to say that in Australia one does hear "This report (or this article) reads well". I was comparing the two different statements in my mind at the time and my concentration obviously lapsed badly! Produced some i...

Thanks, Larry; but only the facetious bits were mine. As I said in my post, the rest is SOD all - as our UK colleagues might say (if such language were tolerated in this forum)

Norm

Andy, maybe your differences with the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar definition aren't so great when you look at the examples it gives (other than "have"). "Blue suits you" or "That jumper fits me" are not so far from "These vegetables sell well". The grammatical subjects can't be called "agen...

I don't think this is going to solve our problem, but the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar gives a slightly different definition of a middle verb, namely "one of a group of apparently transitive verbs that do not normally occur in the passive. The term is not in very general use, but is a way of...

I don't want to comment on what constitutes the general class of "enhancers"; but just to say that the Oxford Dictionary gives "very" as both an adjective and an adverb. It is derived from the Latin words "verus", the adjective "true", and "vero", the adverb "truly", and was used that way in Middle ...