Discussion Forum
This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books.
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What I’m asking isn’t really multiple periods but the use of “...” Is this grammatically correct for replacing commas? I’m currently writing a journal entry for a school assignment and the use of “...” to replace commas might not be grammatically correct.
For those who might not understand what I’m asking this is an example sentence. “I watched the whole thing happen... and yet... I did nothing.”
Would the use of “...” here be correct?
Is the usage of “at anytime” in a sentence has the same connotation as “anytime”?
“You can remove any user from your chat environment at anytime”
“You can remove any user from your chat environment anytime.”
Summarising: Three ways of looking at it. Extracts from the Geoffrey Leech article, English Grammar in Conversation.
View 1: Spoken English has no grammar at all: it is grammatically inchoate.
(That view) ...does not need to be taken seriously, although it is surprisingly persistent in the mind of the folk grammarian. It is inherited from the age-old tradition associating grammar with the written language, and it is bolstered by examples such as the following, which, like others which follow, is from the Longman spoken corpus:
No. Do you know erm you know where the erm go over to er go over erm where the fire station is not the one that white white
View 2: Spoken English does not have a special grammar: its grammar is just the same as the grammar of written English
Conversation makes use of entities such as prepositions, modals, noun phrases and relative clauses, just as written language does. So - assuming, as many would, that differences of frequency belong to the use of the grammar, rather than to the grammatical system itself - it is quite natural to think in terms of one English grammar, whose use in conversational performance can be contrasted with its use in various kinds of writing. In other words, conversational grammar is seen to be just a rather special implementation of the common grammar of English: a discovery which does not necessarily in any way diminish the interest of studying the grammar (i.e. the grammatical use) of spoken language.
View 3: Spoken English does have a special grammar - it has its own principles, rules and categories, which are different from those of the written language.
In handling spoken language, (David) Brazil argues for a totally different approach to grammar from the approach which has become familiar through conventional focus on the written language. He argues for a linear model moving dynamically through time, and puts aside the more traditional architectural model in terms of hierarchies of units. Although Carter and McCarthy do not take this thorough-going approach, they do throw the spotlight on grammatical features of spoken language which they feel have been largely neglected by standard grammars entrenched in the ‘written tradition’. They argue that structures which are inherent to speech have not been properly studied until the advent of the spoken computer corpus, and are consequently absent from canonised written grammar familiar to learners of English throughout the world: structures such as the ‘dislocated topic’ of This little shop ... it’s lovely or the ‘wagging tail’ of Oh I reckon they’re lovely. I really do whippets. These tend to find their raison d’être in the fact that conversation constructs itself in a dynamic fashion, giving the speaker only a small look-ahead window for planning what to say, and often inducing retrospective add-ons. Carter and McCarthy (1995) put forward a structural model for the clause in conversation, containing in addition to the core clause itself a pre-clause topic and a post-clause tail. With their refreshing emphasis on the dynamic modelling of grammar in action, Carter and McCarthy seem to be taking a line similar to Brazil’s advocacy of a new grammar of speech.
Read more at: tu-chemnitz.de
I was taught that biweekly and bimonthly meant twice a week and twice a month, respectively. I can even reference this in my very old dictiionaries as being correct. I now see definitions in dictionaries that define biweekly as twice a week AND every other week (Random House, Webster’s), and bimonthly as every other month. These “new” definitions are also used in every-day conversation, and can be confusing (I now have reverted to twice a week or every other week to clarify). When did this change? If biannually is always twice a year, why are not bimonthly and biweekly twice a month and twice a week?
Now that text messaging has become a normal method of communication, “text” appears to have become a verb, as in “Text your vote in now”. Once that vote has been sent, what is the past tense? I don’t think that I can bring myself to use “texted”, but always saying “sent a text message” seems to be a contrived way to avoid “texted”.
Could anybody tell me what these words above might mean or refer to? I’d be very, very grateful...
teletubbified, beefcakeosity, blubsome, hamburger junction, horseburger (do we really produce that kind of stuff??), jelly-bagging, rocktabulous, froogle, trammel-netter, woo-woo book, telangiectasia, truncus arteriosus. :-)))
Anything odd about this sentence?
“All of a sudden, there was a bottle breaking on the table.”
A fairly authorative, university entrance exam site says this:
Identical with (not to): This bid is identical with the one submitted by you.
However, I have found that “identical to” is more commonly used. Is there a difference? The dictionaries accept both versions.
IYO, is “sailed through” a prepositional verb or a phrasal verb in the sentence below?
She sailed through her exams.
I’ve been told before that I should always avoid the word “got”.
I was reading another question and the phrase “I got burnt” was being thrown around quite a bit, whereas I think “I was burnt” sounds much better grammatically.
Similarly, instead of “I got some mail”, “I received some mail”, and, “I earned straight A’s” instead of “I got straight A’s”.
Is there any basis for this, or are there times when “got” really is the best choice?
