Thus will is not unique in picking out a future time. Moreover, there are some contexts in which will is not the normal way we refer to a future action.
I've always wondered why there isn't a conjugation of words that signifies future tense, and why we simply use "will" instead of having a specific conjugation for a word. Like in past tense, we have the word "walk" conjugated into "walked". I feel this might be confusing to those learning English as well.
In sentence (2), you may have been tempted to declare leaves a future-tense verb, but compare the form to our previous list. It is actually a present-tense form, although the sentence refers to a future event.
I think if we replaced sentence 2's "leave" with "will be leaving", it would also be grammatically correct, but using "leaves" doesn't sound any less wrong, so I can see why verb tenses doesn't always determines the time of an event.
(22f) *The front office has handled routinely those accommodations for guests.
Though I can see why it makes no sense, I feel I've heard something like this in informal conversation, or I might have read it in a book.
A particle forms a one-word phrase that can, but doesn’t have to, appear between the verb and the direct object. Historically, most particles derive from prepositions, but their behavior is so different from ordinary prepositions that we will classify them separately. Particles usually combine with the verb to produce a specific idiomatic meaning that is different from a verb and a prepositional phrase.
If particles work this way for prepositional words such as "up", can the word "to" in infinitives be considered a particles, since it's always followed by a verb?
When PPs modify verbs, they have functions that can often be filled by adverb phrases, or occasionally by other phrase types as well.
I think this is why some words sometimes seems like prepositions and adverbs alike, like "really", "not", "ever", but I don't know if I'm right about that.
Determiners are extremely common in noun phrases.
This explains why possessive nouns and pronouns are usually considered determiners, like 'Mike's', 'hers', 'mine' and so on. Also why determiners are specifiers of noun phrases.
The behavior of proper nouns is illustrated in the first two columns of the table above. Most proper nouns behave like Fred in column 1. They do not allow a plural form (*Evelyns, *Cairos, etc.) and do not appear with determiners (*a Baltimore, *some Evelyn, etc.).
So from what I'm reading here, proper nouns usually begin with upper case letters? Since most proper nouns refer to names and places, which usually begin with upper case letters?
Simply ignoring adverb phrases and prepositional phrases, however, will not be enough to allow us to distinguish all complements from all adjuncts. Under some conditions NPs and AdjPs can also be adjuncts. If we don’t distinguish those adjuncts, we can misanalyze our sentences.
So it seems like the simpler next best way to discern adjuncts in a sentence is to just find the phrase that can be taken out without destroying the sentence.
One consequence of being intransitive verbs is that linking verbs cannot be made passive:
I think I'm still confused about linking verbs, since they're almost similar to intransitive verbs but without adjuncts.
So a linking verb is distinguished by the fact that they have a fixed subject and predicate in place, where they can't be switched in passive form?
(6a) A howl rose.(6b) *The audience rose a howl
If intransitive verb sentences were to be switched to passive form, does that mean the sentences would be nonsensical since "A howl was rose by the audience" wouldn't make much sense? Is that also a clear indication of an intransitive verb?
Many students are taught in grade school to identify the word senator alone as the subject. However, notice that senator is merely the head noun of the subject. The determiner the and the prepositional phrase from California are also part of the subject. In other words, subjects and predicates, along with other grammatical functions we will encounter later, are functions of phrases, not of individual words.
I remember being taught this in high school too! From the perspective of that old mindset, I would think that "from California" doesn't belong as a part of the subject because it could be easily removed from the sentence without changing it's meaning, therefore not being an important part of the sentence or subject.
These units are constituents in the sentence. A constituent is any word or group of words that functions together as an entity. Most rules of syntax do not, in fact, apply to individual words but to larger constituents.
Last class, I realized that two words were combined together to categorize as a single part-of-speech, like "as if" as a subordinate conjunction. I think this is an example of constituency where these two words relate together to make more sense in a sentence as opposed to working alone.
In fact, the problems with traditional parts of speech have prompted some linguists to abandon the term part of speech completely. They have not, however, given up on the idea behind the label.
It seems as if the more English evolves, the more complicated it gets, therefore it becomes more difficult to place words in categories since some words belong to more than one category. This might explain why some educators stick to the traditional rules, since they seem much simpler.
What is a noun? You probably said “a noun is a person, place, or thing.” A verb? It describes an action, right?
I think the reasons we were taught such basic rules and definitions on parts of speech when we were younger is not because our teachers didn't know any better, but because they had to make it simpler for children to understand.
Just imagining what I learn in class currently about the different uses of parts of speech, I would have been confused and lost if I was learning these as a primary school student. Even now I'm still confused while learning the new information and uses on different English words.
For example, the phoneme /k/ in the word ‘kite’ is aspirated, meaning it’s accompanied by a puff of air. But in the word ‘sky’ there is no puff of air along with the /k/ sound.
I think these two words makes the breathing different because in 'sky' a consonant follows the 'k' unlike in the word 'kite'. It was mentioned earlier that consonants stops the puff of air from your lungs while vowels continues the puffing of air. Therefore, the word 'kite' produces a puff of air with the vowel 'i' but 'sky' doesn't, because of the consonant 'y'.
Generally, decoding the entirety of a language’s structural system is ambitious as linguists face the challenge of the evolution of language and simply that some are dying out too quickly.
Is this why languages such as Latin and Hebrew are no longer spoken as much today? I always wonder how languages just fade away in thin air and what made people stop speaking them.
Although a lucky few can absorb new languages easily, most people require laborious study to learn a new language after childhood.
I relate to this as a monolingual who has taken Spanish classes for years during high school. Even though I can memorize some Spanish words, I still don't know enough to speak it fluently because I don't use it on a daily basis. However, if I study it everyday and consistently speak the language I would get better at it.
Linguistics wants to explain things the way they actually are, not to change them according to some preconceived notion.
From what I learned in previous classes, linguists are willing to learn about the differences in everyone's languages because they know that languages change over time. On the other hand, people who have less experience in studying languages want to hang on to the way things are now and conform to the standards all the time. Linguists want to avoid changing the way languages work, and instead explore them.
I began to pay attention to the comments written in the margins of students’ papers, comments that tried to explain the problems with the students’ language but which did so in terms that were inaccurate or unhelpful. For example, they would flag as “passive voice” things that were not, in fact, passive.
In my personal experience, I've found this to be true whenever I have essays being critiqued by professors using Blackboard's "Feedback Studio". I always get the repetitive comment that something is written in passive voice even though it wasn't true. Even when it was, I had difficulty figuring out what the problem was and how it impeded the message in my writing. I figured those comments were technically generated and not comments of my professors.