Teacher Discussion Forums

Marking the past twice is not Standard English. In fact I'd stick my neck out and say that Standard English hardly ever marks anything twice. This particular stricture and others are not adhered to in many other Englishes, so in them you will find your double pasts, as well as double negatives and o...

First of all, that "the" probably needs to go. Unless Star Wars is involved. Secondly, there probably have to be two different males. And some kind of futurity relative to the moment of speaking rather than what is considered normal reported speech. So I suppose that: "John just told David to find o...

What did you put the book we read out of back for?

1b seems more natural because the register of the sentence seems informal. The same can be said of 2b. I would write, or even say, 3a in a formal context but 3b in an informal one. Perhaps the context of talking about dissertations favours 3a. I don't think "whom" is usually used without its preposi...

My credentials as a long term critic/teaser of Dogme are impeccable (ask Diarmuid!) , to the extent that the Blessed Scott once called me and others "whining nay-sayers". My rather inchoate visceral objections to old school hard-core Dogme were the following: Dogmetists tended to assume or leave the...

"Cow's milk" or "Cows' milk" ?

We are at pains to teach frequent collocations but at what point do they become tired clichés or even hated expressions? And if they do, how to unteach them?

Does "earn" ever get included in the list of those optionally irregular verbs? If not, why not? And out of curiosity, when you say "You've earned it" do you pronounce it as if it is spelled/spelt "earnt" ? I could ask the same question about "learned it" "burned it" and "smelled it" I suppose, but t...

"I who have nothing" is another awkward customer.

It sounds fine if there's more than one of "you".

If "you" is (are?) singular then I might avoid it:


*"This is easier for me than for you, who has several dependents."

by putting "a person who " or "someone who " .

It's hard to explain the awkwardness of the "has" though.

I like the iconoclastic approach sometimes: The so-called zeros are simply when "if" is a synonym of "whenever"and the firsts are just time-clauses for pessimists. The only conditionals perhaps worthy of the name are the so-called second, third and mixed ones, which are just some examples, using the...

I am not sure that anybody would be persuaded to read the book on the basis of that excerpt, and nor am I.

Yes, I hadn't noticed that. "Nor" does seem to get its own stress, but even so you can have

nór hád he

and

nór had (schwa) hé

Woodcutter, try emphasizing the final "he" (rather than the "had") and you may see what others have seen: "It was not a decision he had expected Massingham to welcome, and neither had hé." Meaning: It was not a decision Dalgliesh had expected Massingham to welcome, and Dalgliesh hadn't welcomed it e...

"it implies that the final "he" refers to the same person as the first "he"" Which happily brings us full circle, because that was the problem all along, when the unremarkable (to you) "and neither" was the unremarkable (to me amongst others) "and nor", and it hasn't gone away by putting "neither" i...