English grammar

Father’s Day

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

It’s Father’s Day today in many parts of the world. I hope you’re being well treated if you’re one of the men honoured by the day. You really never can have too many pairs of socks. Like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, it’s quite an artificial day, but I don’t mind too much really, as sometimes maybe we need a little push to be grateful. Or to at least express our gratitude.

The word father, like mother, isn’t one we actually use all that much of course, instead preferring works like dad, pop, papa et al. These words, like so many of our words to refer to our mothers, are derived from our first babblings as a child.

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Who’da Thunk it!?

Niall O'Donnell 29 Comments

The English language has a complicated relationship with rules. Almost every major grammar rule you can think has at least a few exceptions. But then there are a few unwritten rules that English speakers adhere strictly to, even when we’re not aware of it. Still, English isn’t generally a stickler for the rules, which makes sense considering it’s quite a mongrel language. This is why I prefer to think of English as having patterns and trends, as opposed to rules. Today, I want to look at one of those trends. To do so, I’ll begin by asking you to consider what the following words have in common:

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“I’d Been Being Watched!”

Niall O'Donnell 1 Comment

Back when I was writing about ablaut reduplication, I read this article on the BBC website, which mentions this unwritten rule, and other structures that we use unconsciously. It’s interesting and worth reading, but I was struck by one passage in particular:

There are so many tenses you can use without even thinking about it, and almost certainly without being able to name them. It depends how you count them, but there are about 20 that you deploy faultlessly. The pluperfect progressive passive for an extended state of action that happened to you prior to another action in the past is, when you put it like that, rather daunting. But then you’d happily say “I realised I’d been being watched” without breaking sweat or blinking.

Eh, not quite without breaking a sweat, I think! Certainly the sentence is grammatically correct, and an example of the passive voice. The active version would be I realised someone had been watching me. We then change that to passive by changing the verb to the past-participle form (watched) and using the appropriate form of to be (had been being – past perfect continuous). But is it really that easy for even a native speaker to say this, and how often would we really use this form?

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The Passive Voice

Niall O'Donnell 12 Comments

Let’s imagine you’re writing an essay about your favourite writer. You might decide to begin by mentioning your favourite of his books, like so:

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949.

Now, let’s imagine you’re writing an essay about your favourite novel. A logical start would be to mention who wrote it, like so:

Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by George Orwell in 1949.

What’s the difference between these two sentences? I’m sure you’ll agree that both contain the same information. But the focus is different, isn’t it? In the first we’re focussing on the writer, and in the second, on the novel. And we change focus by changing focus – between the active voice and the passive voice.

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Perfect!

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

Yesterday, I looked at the present perfect simple tense, a tricky customer for people learning English. The progressive aspect can also of course be in the past and the future, and can be combined with the continuous (progressive) aspect. As with the present perfect simple, the perfect aspect always joins two different time periods together. The present perfect simple is the most common way you’ll use the perfect aspect, but let’s have a quick look at the other ways we use it:

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English Lessons for Experts: Present Perfect Simple

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

We’ve already looked at the three main tenses in English: the past, the present, and the future. Or two tenses, if you don’t consider the future a tense. But in addition to tense, there’s another element to referring to time in English, and that’s aspect. There are three different aspects in English, each of which can be combined with a tense (and sometimes another aspect), and they are: simple, continuous, and perfect.

I’ve already covered simple and continuous in writing about tenses, and they’re fairly straightforward (I go, or I’m going), but the perfect aspect is a little trickier. Before getting into the details, have a look at the following pairs of sentences:

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“How Does he Smell?” “Terrible!” or: Is it “Feel Bad” or “Feel Badly?”

Niall O'Donnell 7 Comments

Or should that be terribly? This is something that can be confusing for native speakers, and I’ve noticed recently more and more people getting into tangles with this area of language. Which ironically, I think, is due to people having more knowledge about language than before. First of all though, what aspect of language are we talking about here?

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