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Which reminds me of the one about the insomniac agnostic dyslexic who sat up all night wondering if there was a dog.

When I learnt German, the fact that, like English, it possesses no future tense was something no one batted an eyelid over, getting by quite happily with present tense (only one in German), modal cognates, and modal-like auxiliaries - just like English. That there can actually be a discussion over w...

Happy to oblige, woodcutter. As noted, 'can be trained' is broken down into modal auxiliary plus base passive infintive, which latter consists of infinitive 'be' plus past participle 'trained'. This holds for "true" passives like the example I gave, which, expanded for clarification, could read "The...

Surely the idea that modal auxiliaries take an infinitve has not outlasted its usefulness. Dynamic verbs normally have six infinitives, four active and two passive: verb: train A. active infinitives - 1. base/simple: train 2. continuous: be training 3. perfect simple: have trained 4. perfect continu...

Low-level learners need natural pronunciation, too, from Day One. It's a matter of rules in operation, not an optional luxury. Start clean, start cool, iconoclast.

Thanks for the replies that were relevant to 'Tense and Time'. Apologies for two parts - the eslcafe server wouldn't take it all, and also disappeared words in italics, bold, etc. Woodcutter asserts that I'm out "to prove tense and time are not linked", despite my clearly stating at the start that "...

It seems to be an American phenomenon restricted to sports - 'the winningest coach' - and, traditionally, to baddies - 'the meanest, toughest, baddest hombre on the block'. 'Winninger' and 'badder' would sound a bit unusual.

8. Where there's a will, there's a way. Some of us know in our bones that tense and mood truly are form. Members of the "last medieval generation", those baby-boomers who had to study Classical Latin and/or Greek at school before the advent of modernity, will probably less than fondly remember that ...

TENSE AND TIME iconoclast 1. Introduction. The inflectional endings of Latin verbs not only carry tense, e.g. present, future, imperfect, but also carry indicative or subjunctive "mood". Imperative mood also exists, but is restricted to a very few inflections. This wealth of Latin tense-and-mood inf...