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The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
Thus would and should can be used with "future-in-the-past" meaning, to express what was expected to happen, or what in fact did happen, after some past time of reference. The use of should here (like that of shall as a plain future marker) is much less common and is generally confined to the first person.
The combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the center of the sentence, such as he had hoped to try to open it. In most sentences, English marks grammatical relations only through word order. The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it.
A sentence diagram is a pictorial representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. The term "sentence diagram" is used more when teaching written language, where sentences are diagrammed. The model shows the relations between words and the nature of sentence structure and can be used as a tool to help recognize which potential ...
A verb (from Latin verbum 'word') is a word that generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive.
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects (whether regional, class-based, generational, or other), difference between the social norms of spoken ...
The future of the past tense/aspect uses the future form since the use of the past tense form to mark the time of perspective retains its influence throughout the rest of the sentence: Da gai sed hi gon fiks mi ap ("The guy said he [was] gonna fix me up").
Text from Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde featuring one-sentence paragraphs and sentences beginning with the conjunctions "but" and "and". This list comprises widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be misconceptions.