English Language Learners

Damkerng T.

00:01

And, 'non-quantized', plural noun, atelic (for John ate apples for 10 minutes).

Anonymous

In duration phrases force an accomplishment interpretation (+telic), while for duration phrases force an activity interpretation (-telic)

2

Damkerng T.

This is really subtle.

Anonymous

The exact number (an apple, three apples) makes it telic because it defines an end-point.

Anonymous

Being non-specific (apples) makes it atelic because there is no end-point defined.

Damkerng T.

Ahh... (Things start to make sense a bit.)

Anonymous

00:03

So! *John ate an apple (+telic) for 10 minutes (-telic)

2

Damkerng T.

There are four example pairs.

> John ate soup for 10 minutes.

> *John ate soup in 10 minutes.

> *John ate two apples for 10 minutes.

> John ate two apples in 10 minutes.

If I can count it, it's telic, I think.

Anonymous

> John ate soup (-telic) for 10 minutes (-telic).
> *John ate soup (-telic) in 10 minutes (+telic).
> *John ate two apples (+telic) for 10 minutes (-telic).
> John ate two apples (+telic) in 10 minutes (+telic).

Anonymous

It's about meaning. If you say "two apples", then I know exactly when the action ends (when two apples are done being eaten)

Anonymous

It sets an end point

Anonymous

If you say "apples" (in general), then there is no end point

Damkerng T.

00:07

Oh, that's how it works!

And this is just in and for.

Anonymous

For 10 minutes suggests that there is no endpoint.

Anonymous

In 10 minutes suggests that you completed something within that timeframe

Anonymous

In suggests completion (an endpoint); for does not (no endpoint)

Anonymous

That is why in duration phrases are +telic, but for duration phrases are -telic

2

Anonymous

In the above examples, the ideas clash

Anonymous

00:08

-telic and +telic are incompatible ideas

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

+telic and -telic are incompatible ideas

Anonymous

The other two sentences work because the telicity matches

Damkerng T.

Now I understand it, but I think I need time to let it sink in.

Anonymous

You can probably skip the stuff about "quantized"

Damkerng T.

00:09

nods

Anonymous

BTW, this is just me, but I don't personally eat soup.

Anonymous

I have soup. :-)

Anonymous

"I had soup today for lunch." "Oh, I had some soup earlier."

Damkerng T.

Haha!

Anonymous

Eating soup always sounded funny to me.

Anonymous

00:12

To put it another way: "John ate apples in an hour" is strange because it suggests he completed the task of eating apples in that time, but without a defined number of apples, it's unclear what exactly John completed

Anonymous

"eating apples" isn't really something you finish

Anonymous

"eating an apple" is :-)

Damkerng T.

What if I say a lot of apples?

> John ate a lot of apples in/*for an hour.

Anonymous

A lot of apples is like five apples.

Anonymous

It's less specific, but it's still a quantity.

Anonymous

00:14

You can accomplish eating a lot of apples in an hour :-)

Damkerng T.

What about other quantifiers, like many.

Anonymous

Um, sure, that's like five, too.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

01:03

This aspect stuff is one of my many weak points that I've been trying to shore up

Damkerng T.

You've been trying to shore up while I still had no clue an hour ago. :)

Anonymous

It's hard stuff. Or, well

Anonymous

I keep feeling like "hard" is the wrong term

Anonymous

It's more like: you need to locate the shoulders of the appropriate giants and then go stand on them :-)

Anonymous

I doubt I could explain any of this stuff without books put together by linguists!

Anonymous

01:15

Sometimes I think I'd like to be an English teacher

Anonymous

Probably never happen, though. I'm doing too much other stuff :-)

Damkerng T.

:)

Jan 23 '13 at 20:45, by Stack Exchange

Welcome to chat for: English Language Learners

It's just about a year and a half.

Anonymous

I s'pose I'm technically teaching English.

Anonymous

Not that I always know what I'm talking about. :-)

Damkerng T.

I think you teach me a lot of things. I'm really grateful for that.

Anonymous

01:34

Lately Dee seems to crawl on top of other snails' shells and then fall asleep :-)

Damkerng T.

Eh? :)

Anonymous

Dee is sleeping on top of Bean's shell.

Anonymous

Snail pile!

Anonymous

Earlier Dee was sleeping on top of Snaily's shell.

Damkerng T.

Soon they will form prepositions and postpositions. :)

I think Snaily is an anaphora now. :)

Anonymous

01:46

I like to say anaphor for the singular

Damkerng T.

Hehe.

Anonymous

02:49

It seems much more natural to pile question words together in Japanese

Anonymous

> 仮にお前の神託を信じるとして、具体的にいつ、どこで、何が起こると言うんだ？
> kari ni omae no shintaku wo shinjiru to shite, gutaiteki ni itsu, doko de, nani ga okoru to iu n da?
> "Supposing I do believe your prophecy, specifically when, where, and what exactly is supposed to happen?"

Anonymous

I'm not sure about the question word pile in English.

Anonymous

My idiolect seems to allow a lot more question word piling than other people's. :-)

Damkerng T.

Isn't it a conjunction reduction?

Anonymous

Can you say when is supposed to happen or where is supposed to happen? :-)

Damkerng T.

02:59

Hmm... Probably not. :)

Anonymous

03:18

Usually if you're analyzed something as a reduced form of something else, it's because that other form is grammatical, so it makes your analysis simpler to do so

Anonymous

(Assuming you can relate them in a principled fashion)

skullpatrol

03:45

What is a "principled" fashion?

Based on their general truth?

Anonymous

A set of rules that relates sentences in specific ways. The principles are your rules

Anonymous

What your rules are is up to you, as long as they fit the evidence (the things people say)

Anonymous

Sometimes people use things like ellipsis in a rather unprincipled fashion, postulating whatever sort of omitted words make a sentence make sense to them

Anonymous

Which can be okay if your goal is to help someone understand and the explanation achieves that goal

Anonymous

But if you're trying to describe language more generally, explanations like "anything at all can be ellipted" are no good because they predict all sorts of ungrammatical sentences would be grammatical

Anonymous

03:52

A lot of people try to come up with specific rules to relate sentences to one another, like for example relating a passive sentence to an active one, or a declarative sentence to an interrogative one

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Maybe "What exactly is supposed to happen, and when and where is it supposed to happen?"

skullpatrol

sort of like "self-disciplined"?

Anonymous

I'm willing to accept "when, where, and what exactly is supposed to happen?"

Anonymous

@skullpatrol I'm just talking about theories in terms of their predictive value

Anonymous

Some explanations of grammar have very little predictive value.

Anonymous

03:55

Predictive/explanatory value

skullpatrol

@snailboat Have you read "The Meaning of Meaning"?

The Meaning of Meaning

The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) is a book by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. It is accompanied by the two supplementary essays by Bronisław Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank. Although the original text was published in 1923 it has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general. The book has been in print continuously since 1923. The most recent edition is t...

Anonymous

08:40

No, why do you ask?

Anonymous

Right now, I'm reading A History of the Japanese Language, and my brain is melting a little bit

Anonymous

Linguistics has an unlimited supply of grammatical terminology

skullpatrol

Just wondering :-)

Anonymous

I've seen voiced-voiceless, and fortis-lenis

Anonymous

Now I have to learn media-tenuis

skullpatrol

08:44

Did you see my explanation of principle/principal in the ELU room?

Anonymous

No

Anonymous

I dedicate far too much of my life to SE chat already, and if I tried to keep up with that crazy room I'd have to triple my current time investment! ;-)

Anonymous

What did you say there?

Anonymous

Would you like to link to it?

skullpatrol

I may have found the source of confusion between principle and principal. The definitions of both have the idea of "first" in them. A principle is a general truth that we start off with "first." On the other hand, a principal is of "first" in importance. I believe this confusion can be avoided by using "most important" for principal

Also, principal is an adjective when used to mean 'most important' and principle is always a noun.

Anonymous

08:51

I memorized a rule for telling them apart when I was little, but I no longer feel very certain about it since people use the spellings variously, even accomplished writers

Anonymous

The OED lists possible etymologies for both, and there is overlap between them--they may historically be the same word rather than closely related, I think?

Anonymous

I don't know. But clearly they do have the "first" aspect you point out in their current and historical meaning

Anonymous

I know that a school has a principal, and that a human has principles

Anonymous

And I think a film has a principal photographer

skullpatrol

We always try to solve things from first principles too :-)

Anonymous

08:54

Hmm, I guess I can tell the difference, upon reflection

Anonymous

I am still technically sick

Anonymous

Though I'm feeling better :-)

skullpatrol

what's wrong?

Anonymous

Sinus stuff. I had a fever. It's mostly gone now

skullpatrol

icic

So a "principal principle" makes sense but not vice versa.

Anonymous

09:01

A principle principal is a principal who's gung-ho about principles

skullpatrol

Good one :D

That would be an overly principled principal.

Anonymous

In principle I agree with you, but the principal principle is the principal's principality

skullpatrol

you win

Awal Garg

12:24

whats with all the principals?

Who has seen Harry Potter and the Half Blood "Prinicipal"?

Awal Garg

15:59

Great, I engaged in a war with some SciFi mods and [almost] won!!!

Anonymous

17:27

Chat isn't something you win.

jimsug

Winning chat seems like an unusual boast.

It's like saying that you "won" a discussion... seems incongruous.

Damkerng T.

17:49

tiptoe tiptoe...

Fantasier

huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/… This is awesome.

Damkerng T.

I'm curious to learn more about the technique they use to mix the colors for the pen (when writing on paper).

It's awesome 'cause it can reproduce the color on paper!

Fantasier

It's literally the color picker tool and a real pen combined :)

Damkerng T.

nods

Fantasier

And I meant, of course, literal literally. :P

Damkerng T.

17:57

Something I wouldn't believe exists if I didn't see the article you linked to.

now wondering whether it should be 'exists' or 'exists'...

Fantasier

exists or exists? Of course exists!

Damkerng T.

(Do people really talk like that? I'm not so sure, but I guess they probably do. -- Something X wouldn't/couldn't believe Y)

The 'there is this place' question (ell.stackexchange.com/q/24936/3281) reminds me of a conversation here; I mentioned 'there is this big tree in my garden', I think.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Something [ ~~that~~ I wouldn't believe [ ___ exists ] ]

Anonymous

Has to be exists

Damkerng T.

nods -- My intuition said 'exists'; my grammar (defunct?) warned me 'probably exist'.

Apr 15 at 20:31, by Damkerng T.

Btw, I think I have this very big tree in my garden.

I said something like that indeed!

@snailboat Hello! Do you feel better today?

Anonymous

18:09

@DamkerngT. I'm feeling okay :-)

Anonymous

I didn't sleep well

Anonymous

I had bad dreams about historical morphology (no, really)

Damkerng T.

Yay! (Aww)

Oh, you had multiple dreams!

Anonymous

Well, I don't really remember specifically except that I woke up and was in an unpleasant state of mind, and my mind was clouded with all the nonsensical details my brain had come up with

Damkerng T.

Hmm... How can one dream about morphology?

Anonymous

18:10

Kind of like when I was studying kanji 15+ hours a day and I started to dream about made-up kanji

Damkerng T.

Haha.

Anonymous

You can dream about just about anything you experience in your daily life

Anonymous

If you devote enough of your waking time to something, it increases the odds that you'll keep it in mind while you're asleep

Damkerng T.

I probably will dream about yu swimming soon.

Anonymous

So I've played video games a lot, then dreamt about the video games

Anonymous

18:11

(Sort of a tetris effect dealie)

Damkerng T.

Tetris!

Anonymous

I've done a lot of stuff in text on a computer and dreamed in text mode

Damkerng T.

LOL

Anonymous

Unfortunately, the dreams always seem to twist the reality

Anonymous

At one point I had a dream about pet slugs

Damkerng T.

18:12

Oh, then you got pet snails!

Anonymous

But the slugs were giant amorpheous beings, a couple feet long but blob shaped

Anonymous

and glowing

Anonymous

And they could be split into two, and then there'd be two slugs

Damkerng T.

They glow?

Anonymous

And one of them lived in my refrigerator

Anonymous

18:13

This was a dream :-)

Damkerng T.

Ahh

Anonymous

I did show you my old pet slug

Anonymous

I think

Anonymous

It was less than an inch long :-)

Damkerng T.

Hmm... I thought he was somebody else's.

Anonymous

18:14

The slug I took pictures of myself is one that I caught outside

Damkerng T.

Oh, the small one.

Anonymous

But I think I've shown you pictures of slugs that other people took

Anonymous

Slugs are cute!

Damkerng T.

nods

1

Q: Coining a plural

I want to coin a word for the plural of octopus, since so many different dictionaries say different things, like octopodes, octopi or octopuses, which could be confusing. For example, you might get bad marks for using the one you think is right, but is actually wrong! I'd like to make the plura...

"..."

Anonymous

They can uses anything they like as a plural of octopus!

Anonymous

18:16

The hard part is getting anyone else to accept it :-)

Damkerng T.

It looks more like a campaign than a question. :P

Anonymous

Well, they've got to! How else are they going to convince the world that their plural is the best? :-)

Damkerng T.

Haha!

Anonymous

Octopae. Really.

Anonymous

English speakers do form a lot of nonce plurals.

Anonymous

18:19

A lot of people jokingly use virii, for example

Anonymous

And a few seriously (!)

Damkerng T.

Hah!

Anonymous

I don't know where the -ii nonce plural comes from.

Anonymous

A reanalysis of radii?

Anonymous

Everyone learns radii in school.

Anonymous

18:21

So you can find uterus nonce-pluralized as uterii

Damkerng T.

Now I'm not sure which ones are real. :D

Anonymous

Well, uterius isn't a word as far as I'm aware :-)

Anonymous

Unix folks say boxen as a plural of box (meaning "computer")

Damkerng T.

It sounds nice.

It could even be logical!

> This [There is this place] is a very common colloquial use, and it is ‘non-Standard’ rather than ‘sub-Standard’.

Ahh

Anonymous

18:36

I think most linguists prefer nonstandard to substandard because the latter has a connotation of inferiority (as in substandard workmanship), with sub- meaning "beneath", whereas non- just means "not" with no judgment implied

2

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Although you will find substandard used by some linguists--maybe more often in older publications?

Damkerng T.

The way StoneyB explained it is also interesting.

Anonymous

How did he explain it?

Damkerng T.

Based on his explanation, I summed it up as: this this is the for the speaker, but a for the listener.

Anonymous

18:39

I can't tell what you're talking about.

Anonymous

You would have to include some sort of context.

Damkerng T.

> The fact is that this is used here not as a demonstrative but as a sort of article with something of the senses of both the and a. You might think of it as an ‘introductory definite’ article: speakers say this NOUN when they have in mind a specific instance of NOUN in mind which has not yet been introduced into the discourse.
http://ell.stackexchange.com/a/24949/3281

Anonymous

1

A: There is this place

You correctly understand that this use of this is not Standard, and is not employed in formal discourse; and I agree with you that the demonstrative pronoun jars in this context, whether you understand there as a dummy pronoun or a demonstrative pro-adverb. The fact is that this is used here not...

Damkerng T.

(unemphases mine)

Anonymous

Ahh, both answers say there is a dummy subject

Anonymous

18:41

I think this can be demonstrated most clearly by putting both theres in one sentence

Anonymous

> There's something there.

Anonymous

The first one has a reduced pronunciation and no locative meaning

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Of course, there's also Gertrude Stein's famous "There's no 'there' there" :-)

Damkerng T.

:D

Anonymous

18:48

Typically this is definite, like the

Anonymous

In this case, this is atypical and not definite

Anonymous

Which you can see by trying to substitute a or the. A would be felicitous, but the would not

Anonymous

The speaker doesn't assume the listener will be able to identify the referent of the NP in this case.

Anonymous

I think I would prefer to say informal over nonstandard

Anonymous

This doesn't conflict with there because the latter is a dummy pronoun, and the former only expresses figurative distance (in discourse, the new element being introduced is closer to the speaker than the listener)

Anonymous

18:52

Oh well, no need for me to write an answer, s'already got two :-)

Damkerng T.

That conflict has never crossed my mind.

You could!

F.E.

CGEL considers that use of "this" to be "False definite 'this'"--page 1401, with example "Last week there was this strange dog wandering around the neighborhood" which is marked with '%'
CGEL says: 'This strange dog' here is replaceable by 'a strange dog' but not by 'the strange dog'. Hence the name "false definite": the NP is definite in form, but indefinite in meaning. This use is characteristic of informal style and, as indicated by the '%' annotation, is not found in the speech of all speakers.

How do I bold stuff? And put stuff in italics?

Damkerng T.

You just did! ;-)

Does CGEL mention which dialects?

Anonymous

Though watch out--bold and italics and such don't work in multi-line messages :-(

F.E.

Yeah, I thought it didn't work before . . . Tiger old, tiger got slow finger claws in old age.

Here, I think CGEL is using '%' for the meaning of "are regularly used by a significant proportion of speakers of Standard English, and not generally thought by ordinary speakers to be non-standard; they pass unnoticed in broadcast speech all the time." -- page 9.

Damkerng T.

19:01

I think I've heard this kind of this often enough, enough that I thought it's a standard usage.

F.E.

It is standard usage--just very informal, that's all. (To say it simply, that is.)

Damkerng T.

nods

F.E.

A big problem, or issue, is that there is a too common confusion that concerns style with being grammatical. There's a lot of stuff that is grammatical in today's standard English, but is not acceptable in some formal styles of English. Just because something isn't acceptable in a teacher's, or pedant's, formal style doesn't mean that that something is ungrammatical. There are many different styles in today's standard English: they range from formal to neutral to informal.

And there are lots of different kinds of dots in that range from formal to neutral to informal (styles).

Damkerng T.

19:30

Oh, it was only 70 years ago.

It's strange that we can say that things both have changed a lot and haven't changed much at the same time.

Anonymous

What was 70 years ago?

Damkerng T.

D-Day.

I just checked out my feeds. :D

My cable TV also announced something weird.

I'm not sure what they say. (I'm still waiting for the same ticker coming up next time.)

@snailboat This might be a strange question, but I'm curious. I know that you can type in English fast. Then, what about your typing in Japanese? Do you think that it's necessary to be able to type fast in the language we want to learn--suppose that we want to write stuff in that language too?

(Btw, it's strange that I can type in English faster than in Thai, though not by much. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that English has only 26 letters.)

Anonymous

19:54

@DamkerngT. Typing in Japanese is necessarily slower due to picking kanji from candidate lists and the mental cost of confirming that the conversions have been done correctly

Anonymous

Still, you can type Japanese relatively quickly.

Damkerng T.

Ahh... It's probably different in Japanese and Chinese.

Anonymous

Chinese has a much more straightforward orthography

Anonymous

Still not very easy, of course :-)

Damkerng T.

nods :D

I bet that there must be a website for world records on typing in various languages somewhere out there.

F.E.

20:52

@DamkerngT. I just saw your comment on that thread about a novel and simple past vs past-perfect. You ought to expand on it and make it an answer (since the only answer there is, er, misguided). Explain to the OP that in a novel in past-tense narrative, the "simple past-tense" is used for the usual present-tense, and the past-perfect is used for the present-perfect--in general--as that is the fiction writing convention that most writers use.

I also had meant to type: the novelist's past-perfect is used for both the present-perfect and past-tense.

Damkerng T.

nods -- I think this typically happens because of the back-shifting.

Not that I'm very sure that I could write a good answer to the question, though. :P

F.E.

It's sorta amazing how often (almost always) that native English speakers aren't aware that the grammar of a novel is different from our so-called standard grammar--that novelists have their own writing conventions.

@DamkerngT. Yes, I think that is a practical way of looking at it. It is probably a grammatically sound way of explaining it too. :)

Damkerng T.

I think it'd be better if someone like you answered that question. :D

F.E.

Nope, I don't have an account on ELL. I don't plan to either. It'll take up way too much of my time. I write enough lengthy posts as it is on ELU.

Damkerng T.

Ahh... I just realized that you don't have an ELL account. :)

It would be great if you have one.

Anonymous

21:01

*cries* Until this day, innocent ELL had not been exposed to the DP hypothesis. Oh, for happier days now gone! — snailplane 24 secs ago

F.E.

Tigers like to sleep. Tigers like their naps. For tigers are part of the cat family.

Er, "DP hypothesis"?

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Are we going down a gloomy path?

Anonymous

@F.E. Pullum has a summary online in slide format: lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/detv_sli.pdf

Damkerng T.

Ahh... articles are determinatives.

F.E.

@snailboat Oh, so that's related to the linguistics battle over NP vs DP, as to what is the head of that phrase . . . They're actually, er, discussing that issue on ELL?

Anonymous

21:07

@DamkerngT. Yes. There's some terminological confusion there. Quirk et al. decided to switch determiner and determinative in their 1985 grammar, rather than following Huddleston 1984

Anonymous

@F.E. It's not really relevant to the question, but it came up in an answer

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. So you'll see people say determiner when Huddleston & Pullum would say determinative

Damkerng T.

And now we have determinative phrases.

Anonymous

Well, they're useful things. :-)

Anonymous

See the trees with hardly any and just about all

Damkerng T.

21:10

Ohhh

(Typically, I should say "I see" after "Oh", but this time I'm not sure that I see, so Ohhh was left hanging. :-)

> We could see hardly any trees.

Maybe.

So hardly is not an adverb?

Anonymous

Sure it is.

Damkerng T.

But it modifies any rather than see?

Anonymous

Right. It's in the phrase [ hardly any ]

Damkerng T.

But we can move hardly to be before see, right?

> We could hardly see any trees.

Anonymous

Then you have a different structure.

Anonymous

21:18

> [ [ Hardly any ] trees ] remained unscathed.

Damkerng T.

Hmm...

Anonymous

> Hardly any cause for alarm, right?

Anonymous

> Hardly any architecture typified as Christian can be found in the fourth-century Balkans.

Anonymous

> Hardly any Western oil company has been spared from the complexities of operating in the Russian business arena.

Anonymous

> Hardly any radios are intact.

Damkerng T.

21:19

Ahh

Anonymous

I felt bad about making up an example, so I grabbed some from COCA :-)

Anonymous

(I made up the one where most of the trees got scathed)

Damkerng T.

Though they could be understood as hardly modifying the main verb, I think we can read hardly any as a unit too.

Anonymous

Nah, then you could say things like *Any radios are hardly intact, but you can't.

Damkerng T.

Oh, we can't?

Anonymous

21:22

Nope.

Damkerng T.

> Our radios are hardly intact.

This is fine, I think.

Oh, I see.

Anonymous

That has a different meaning.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Hardly in hardly any is what CGEL calls an approximate negator. Compare it to "almost no"

Damkerng T.

[ Any X are hardly Y ] sounds strange indeed.

Anonymous

21:25

But "Our radios are hardly intact" sounds like a retort to "Your radios are intact", asserting an obvious contradiction with the facts

Anonymous

With the meaning "No, our radios are certainly not intact"

Damkerng T.

nods

It's better to think of hardly any as a unit.

Anonymous

It makes sense semantically to say it modifies any. Hardly reduces the quantity to very few

Anonymous

So hardly any as a phrase specifies a quantity.

Anonymous

(An unspecified but very low quantity)

Damkerng T.

21:34

-1

A: Difference between the past simple tense and the past perfect tense

The past tenses in English are somewhat complicated on face value, but are fairly easy to deal with once you understand the situations they describe. Let's take a look at the two you're interested in: Simple Past Simple past is aptly named, as it's very simple to follow. The only thing you have...

I reread this answer and I'm not sure it deserves -1. (I didn't downvote this one.)

Anonymous

Let's take a look.

Anonymous

> The only thing you have to do when using the simple past is use the past participle of the verb

Damkerng T.

Oh, he wrote that. I missed that, I think.

Anonymous

Maybe it was a simple typo and someone could drive-by edit it :-)

Anonymous

But no

Anonymous

21:38

> The past perfect uses the past participle of to have, had, in conjunction with the past participle of the verb.

Anonymous

I think someone has to point out that the syncretism between preterite and past participle doesn't extend to all verbs

Anonymous

For verbs like eat they need to be distinguished in form: ate, eaten

Anonymous

For verbs like have, both are the same in form: had, had. But since the two differ for many verbs, we distinguish them functionally, and so it's confusing to refer to had as the past participle when the form is being used as the preterite

Damkerng T.

A misuse of terminology, maybe.

Anonymous

Yes, but fixable, hopefully :-)

Damkerng T.

21:44

Perhaps this is how an average native speaker could get confused when trying to talk about grammar and usage. :)

Anonymous

Certainly. When I was little I had no idea what the difference between the two forms was.

Damkerng T.

I tried to shift things back to the point she was lingering on her memory of everything just happened. I don't know how good it is.

> When he walked me to my door, he kissed me. Like before, it felt good, and the closeness was nice. His taste is warm, and the gentle touches of his tongue against mine had been exciting. I had been happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours. But Linc ended the kiss and then let out a deep breath before kissing me on the forehead and saying goodnight.

The original:

> When he had walked me to my door, he had kissed me. Like before, it had felt good, and the closeness had been nice. His taste was warm, and the gentle touches of his tongue against mine had been exciting. I had been happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours. But Linc had ended the kiss and then let out a deep breath before kissing me on the forehead and saying goodnight.

Anonymous

22:31

Honestly, I'm not really good at this grammar stuff. I just keep trying, is all :-)

Anonymous

Even today, after being exposed to the preterite-past participle distinction probably tens of thousands of times, I think to myself "Wait, I'd better make sure I know which one is which" :-)

Damkerng T.

23:54

By the way, Japan claims that they could win this World Cup, not just "having a shot" at it. (Note: Its odds, according to the news, is 120:1.)

Transcript for

English Language Learners