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The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
As is generally the case with creole languages, it is an isolating language and modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries. [5] The invariance of the modal auxiliaries to person, number, and tense makes them analogous to modal auxiliaries in English.
English allows the use of "stranded" prepositions. This can occur in interrogative and relative clauses, where the interrogative or relative pronoun that is the preposition's complement is moved to the start , leaving the preposition in place. This kind of structure is avoided in some kinds of formal English. For example:
The first of these sentences is a basic zero conditional with both clauses in the present tense. The fourth is an example of the use of will in a condition clause [4] (for more such cases, see below). The use of verb tenses, moods and aspects in the parts of such sentences follows general principles, as described in Uses of English verb forms.
Examples are the English and French conditionals (an analytic construction in English, [c] but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past, [1] and of which each has thus been referred to as a "so-called conditional" [1] [2] (French: soi-disant conditionnel [3] [4] [5]) in modern and contemporary linguistics ...
Get ready for all of today's NYT 'Connections’ hints and answers for #605 on Wednesday, February 5, 2025. ... February 5. 1. Perks/benefits you might receive at a job. 2. Something that signals ...
By contrast, (5) could be paraphrased as 'Given his abilities, the strength of his teeth, etc., it is possible for John to open a beer bottle with his teeth'. Here, the modal base is defined by a subset of John's abilities, the modal force is possibility. (5) John can open a beer bottle with his teeth.
Perceived violations of correct English usage elicit visceral reactions in many people. For example, respondents to a 1986 BBC poll were asked to submit "the three points of grammatical usage they most disliked". Participants stated that their noted points "'made their blood boil', 'gave a pain to their ear', 'made them shudder', and 'appalled ...