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When the condition refers to the past, but the consequence to the present, the condition clause is in the past perfect (as with the third conditional), while the main clause is in the conditional mood as in the second conditional (i.e. simple conditional or conditional progressive, but not conditional perfect).
In predictive conditional sentences, the future tense or imperative generally appears in the main clause, but the condition clause is formed with the present tense (as in English). This contrasts with subordinate clauses introduced by certain other conjunctions, such as quand ("when"), where French uses the future (while English has the present).
A condition can be both necessary and sufficient. For example, at present, "today is the Fourth of July" is a necessary and sufficient condition for "today is Independence Day in the United States". Similarly, a necessary and sufficient condition for invertibility of a matrix M is that M has a nonzero determinant.
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for example, "bat". Many, though not all of these, have first syllables that evolved from Latin.
An opinion piece excerpted from his book Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Grammar Puss Archived 2014-04-30 at the Wayback Machine, by Steven Pinker (1994). Argues against prescriptive rules. A revised draft of this article became the chapter "The Language Mavens" in The Language Instinct
The English subjunctive is realized as a finite but tenseless clause.Subjunctive clauses use a bare or plain verb form, which lacks any inflection.For instance, a subjunctive clause would use the verb form "be" rather than "am/is/are" and "arrive" rather than "arrives", regardless of the person and number of the subject.
English has indicative, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive moods. Not all the moods listed below are clearly conceptually distinct. Individual terminology varies from language to language, and the coverage of, for example, the "conditional" mood in one language may largely overlap with that of the "hypothetical" or "potential" mood in ...