Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi Larry, give Hong Kong my regards. :wink: Part of the reason I tend to give rather involved answers to apparently simple questions is that I'm not so much educating the OP (or myself!) as trying to anticipate the often conflicting demands of potentially quite querulous Asian teachers of English (w...

I suspect that the most common form of the expression is simply that something isn't the be-all and end-all full stop (i.e. there might not need to be an 'of...life' tacked on at the end). Obviously the addition of 'my' serves to specify the speaker (should the context demand that). As for the choic...

The first two terms appear to be synonymous (though coined by different people - Selinker versus Corder), while the third term seems much more general (e.g. 'slips or "performance errors" that even a native speaker may make when tired, or drunk, etc') and not specifically related to SLA. From what I...

Again, welcome. Bear in mind that the BNC describes British norms, which may not always be relevant in modern India!

You're very welcome, Kapvijay! To search for strings like prep + -ing + -en, use corpora that are tagged (~ with a tagset, for parts of speech), like the one here: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ I've selected the search string you'll need, from the POS list. Just copy and paste the following string into...

Hi Kapvijay, and welcome to the AL forum! :wink: Here 'having' is verbal participle, isn't it?. So How does the preposition 'for' take verbal participle instead of noun? The most important thing is that at least it isn't ...for *have sent me the brochure LOL. That is, '-ing forms' (nice fuzzy indete...

The more I've used it, the more I've become a great fan of the OALD's clear grammar codings and separation of words that can be more than one part of speech/word class into discreet sub-entries. The MED is also pretty good in this respect, in that it at least has boxes above the word explaining how ...

It's not so much a question of grammatical (in)correctness as a matter of chosen phrasing. Leaving aside the 'more...than not' for a second, if the speaker or writer starts with 'It's likely', they have committed themselves to an initial clause with a "dummy subject" (it) already. There are then sev...

2 certainly sounds the most natural; 3 is a bit formal~strange. 1 is just a proposition-combining~ellipting (I don't like basketball and [I don't like] basketball) and probably somewhat less usual way of expressing the meaning of 2, in which the 'or' isn't doing much other than simply combining the ...

Yes, there are. The following consonantal sounds do not occur at the end of English words: /h/, /w/, and /j/. Final /r/ meanwhile is usually silent in RP but pronounced in GenAm and other "r accents".

(Source: Collins COBUILD English Guides 8: Spelling).

As Sally says, you can transcribe any language regardless of its orthography if you use IPA (by which I mean a broad phonemic inventory drawn from the IPA) instead. IPA is also a good way of showing the pronunciation of words that may have a difficult or ambiguous pronunciation e.g. I read a book ev...

Heh, you're welcome, Forgorin! I'm beginning to think there's only you and me left here...

1: Let us do away with all ceremony (=Do away with all ceremony!) 2a: *Let all ceremony done away with. 2b: Let all ceremony be done away with. The word 'us' has disappeared, the past participle of do somehow appeared (which surely needs something, i.e. a form of be, in the chain before it to trigge...

In both sentences, the 'as to whether/if' part is a bit redundant, given the meaning of 'doubt', but once one has started down this wordier route then the '...if' phrasing does for whatever reason sound less smooth compared to the '...whether'. I wouldn't say either sentence is wrong, though, just t...

Hi Woody, long time no see. How's it hangin'? Maybe you could look back over the methods and materials used in Callum-style classes and give us a few examples of how words are introduced and then "built up" over time? Off the top of my head, how about something very high-frequency but ubertricky, li...