Language Overflow

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Feeds

03:10

I am reading a great book “Principles.” of Dalio, Ray There's a paraphrase called “Make believability-weighted decisions.” “• Make believability-weighted decisions. My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?” The...

meaning-in-context

2 hours later…

Feeds

04:41

Q: Can I ask to rate my English language level?

Can I ask some one to rate the quality of English language by just writing few sentences on any topic? OR Can I write some paragraphs on some topic and ask to correct the grammatical mistakes and suggestion for improvisation? If this above requests cant be done at present. I would request it ...

feature-request

8 hours later…

Aayvu.com

12:17

I came across the following statement in my email "Your balance is exhausted, So your ads have stopped running.", If I write the same thing, I would write "Your balance was exhausted, so your ads stopped running." Probably both mean same. but I am not matching with the native. Whats your comment on this?

Anonymous

12:31

In this case, exhausted is an adjective: macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/exhausted

Anonymous

That's why using is with it is natural.

Anonymous

It's a kind of adjective called a "participial adjective". This means the adjective is derived from a participial verb form.

Anonymous

Exhausted can also be a past participial verb form, as in your example, in which case was is grammatical.

Anonymous

So you're right, the meaning would be basically the same.

Anonymous

I feel like it might be a little more natural with is, though, just because it's a bit more common to use the derived adjective.

Anonymous

12:33

That's just my personal impression, though.

ColleenV

13:06

@snailplane I probably would write "Your balance has been exhausted, so your ads have stopped running." I'm not sure why - probably because "is exhausted" seems more like the "tired" definition than the "used up" definition to me. "Your balance is exhausted..." seems like it has just finished running a marathon :)

Anonymous

13:43

@ColleenV That's funny, that's the same thing I thought of when I read the version with was :-)

Anonymous

I probably wouldn't have used the word exhausted to begin with, although there isn't anything really wrong with it.

ColleenV

15:31

@snailplane Maybe "depleted" would have been better?

There is something weird about having "exhausted" and "running" in the same sentence and it not being about physical activity lol

Anonymous

15:55

I wanted to use "run out", but then I thought that might be bad with "run" in the second half.

Araucaria

19:07

Interesting question on the dark side:

Q: "I was starting suspecting something was wrong" <-- What's the grammar problem here?

I have been using “starting suspecting” frequently thinking that it’s correct too but recently my friend corrected me. I don't understand why. It is well-known that start to + verb and start verb-ing are interchangeable in terms of meaning: It started to rain. It started raining. T...