Teacher Discussion Forums

I can't quite see where you're going with your last post, Revel, but (please correct me if I've misinterpreted it) it seems to me that you're saying that 'there' sometimes does represent something beyond language, something in "the real world" (i.e. it has more than a grammatical function). I'd agre...

If you'll allow me to do some fence sitting, I'd like to agree with both Stephen and Glenski. I agree with Stephen that the idea of 'parts of speech' has limited usefulness. But I also agree with Glenski that 'there' isn't a pronoun, since it doesn't represent anything. So let's forget about parts o...

Apparently, 'there' is an expletive, so it's best used with caution:

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/expletive

...but I'd like to give it a try, for once. You have made your comment on the structural soundness of this sentence. You've compared it to potato blight. That's good old-fashioned prescription in anyone's book of metaphors. If my assertion is absurd, on what basis do you make yours - that redundancy...

All I can say is that I'm not in the business of making insulting attacks on the mainly civil users of this forum, and as for verbosity...

The sentence might sound awkward to some ears, but I can't imagine why anyone would have any objections to it on structural grounds. 'during' here is a preposition with complement 'the time'. 'when' here introduces a defining relative clause modifying 'the time.' It can be omitted because it refers ...

Seiichi: I think you're completely right to say that, on its own, it's ambiguous. The structure of the noun phrase can be read either as: ((truck drivers, doctors and others) who need to stay awake over a long period of time) or ((truck drivers), (doctors) and (others who need to stay awake over a l...

Sorry, wjserson: I'm not sure what you mean by "the ue of 'make'." Andrew: I agree that 'take' in the second example would be more likely, but would 'make' therefore be impossible? And the use of 'make' in the first example sounds fine to me. It seems that the collocation sounds acceptable in certai...

Thanks for your replies, Stephen and Andrew. I'll try to remember that we don't wince at grammar mistakes, and refrain from doing so in future (hard or otherwise) - although certain utterances from native speakers have from time to time caused me to react as if to a slightly painful stimulus, though...

I need some consensus:

Would you wince (very hard) if you overheard this dialogue?:

A: Where's Bill?
B: He's making a business trip.

I don't want to influence your responses, so I won't give my reasons for asking this just yet.

Can anyone explain the semantics behind different kinds of genitives. First, some terminology might make the discussion easier. I understand that "My father's car" uses a synthetic genitive, while the "the hills of Africa" uses an analytic genitive to indicate possession. Why can we say: 1) She borr...