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a) He acted as President while Mr. Bush was ill.

b) He was acting President while Mr. Bush was ill.

Thanks

The first might have been a more informal arrangement in another context and I might capitalise "acting" if it was a title:

*I acted as secretary during the meeting.

**I was Acting Secretary during the meeting.


* It was me who took notes though it wasn't my job.

** My official role

The first one sets my Spanglish alarm ringing:
Actuó cómo Presidente

but it's a false alarm. The British National Corpus has 686 entries for 'acted as'.

Stephen,

The o in como has no written accent in your example.

By the way what's the British National Corpus.

Isn't google a more comprehensive though a more chaotic corpus??

I agree with you, Juan. If he was the official person acting as President while the original was incapacitated or something along those lines, you would indeed write "Acting President" with a capital 'A'.

The original examples demonstrate this perfectly:

"He was acting as Director of Communications for the last six months..." (describes what he was doing at the time, "replacing the Director")

"He was Acting Director of Communications for the last six months..." (states his official role at the time)

'll correct the mistake - rather a whopper I must admit!

The British National Corpus is a corpus of 100 million words. There are also other national vcorpora, including the US, Kenyan, Indian, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and no doubt others.

The advantage of the BNC over Google is that it can be searched for various collocations. It was set up to be used by linguists. I often use Google, but there are many hidden difficulties, and there is no way you can search by wild card or simply part of speech.

cftranslate wrote:a) He acted as President while Mr. Bush was ill.

b) He was acting President while Mr. Bush was ill.

Thanks

both sentences correct.. but not equivalant!
The indication here is time.. in the first sentence he acted as a president for a certain while during the illness period.. but in the second sentence he was acting as president for the whole period of the President's illness..

Just a thought.. could be wrong

You are indeed wrong. In both cases, the stand-in would step down once Bush had recovered (that is, 'while Mr Bush was ill' x2).

Until the public was foolish enough to actually elect him, I thought it was Bush who was acting as President. This shouldn't be taken as a joke.