predicate-frames

Preposition after ‘deluged’

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I am aware that the word deluged means two things: Flooded with water Overwhelmed The question I want to ask is its usage in a sentence. Would I say ‘deluged with’ or ‘deluged by’ something? In other words, should I use ‘by’ or ‘with’ when using the word ‘deluged’? Thank you. Princeton Review “Word Smart” … Read more

What is verb tense consistency?

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“To his great astonishment and mortification, Sticky saw his parents begin trying less and less to find him, instead devoting their time and energy toward the proper disposal of their newfound riches” So I stumbled upon this sentence and the part which usually confuses is keeping the consistency of the tenses and my english teacher … Read more

difference in meaning between 2 phrases

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I need to know the difference between these two sentences 1)He stopped to playing football 2)He stopped playing football Answer He stopped to playing football is ungrammatical; the grammatical form would be He stopped to play football, and that would mean that he stopped whatever activity he was doing at the time, and started playing … Read more

What’s the syntactic explanation in “Mistakes are likely to happen”:

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I’m con­fused about this sen­tence con­struc­tion: Mis­takes are likely to hap­pen. I’ve thought of three pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tions; are any of them cor­rect? Where likely is an ad­jec­tive act­ing as a sub­ject com­ple­ment, then to hap­pen acts as some type of ad­verb mod­i­fy­ing likely? (But I don’t know what that type would be if so.) To … Read more

What are some give-type verbs that cannot undergo straight dative alternation?

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The following dative alternations sound off to me: I want to donate my clothes to charity. –> I want to donate charity my clothes. He has to submit his paper to his teacher. –> He has to submit his teacher his paper. If these words cannot undergo dative alternation, is there a rule explaining why? … Read more

Has the verb “to import me” ever been commonly used in English the way “to concern me” is in the phrase “It does not concern me”?

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In various Euro­pean lan­guages, most es­pe­cially in the Ro­mance ones, their own re­spec­tive cog­nates for our Latin-de­rived word im­port can be used as a verb in much the way as the verb con­cern is used in cur­rent English: Não me importa. (Portuguese) No me importa. (Spanish) No m’importa. (Catalan) Cela ne m’importe pas. (French) Those … Read more

Is “make me to go” grammatical?

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Is this sentence grammatically correct? You can’t make me to go with you. Is the word to required there or not, and why? Answer When some verbs — and “make” is one of them — take an infinitive as an object or objective complement, the particle “to” is omitted. This construct is called a “bare … Read more