Oh, dear. It had to happen sooner or later: a direct clash with Chronicle editorial authority over a point of 19th-century prescriptive grammar. My Our esteemed editor, Heidi Landecker, who has saved ...
A few weeks ago, I mentioned here a CNN article “about the president making an unannounced stop.” Two readers emailed with the same question. Here’s Bill in Niskayuna, N.Y.: “I was taught that a noun ...
The gerund and the present participle look exactly the same but there are a few ground rules for distinguishing between them. The gerund functions as a noun. “Hurting people is a bad idea.” The gerund ...
To play this video you need to enable JavaScript. Do you have a question you want us to answer? You can send us your questions to learningenglish@bbc.co.uk Rafael has sent us a question. He wants to ...
Though gerunds and present participles share the same -ing form, their grammatical roles differ: gerunds act as nouns, while participles act as verbs or adjectives. For example, 'Reading helps me ...
LAST week we took up the perfect infinitive as a grammatical form that, in tandem with the main verb of a sentence, either refers to things that might have happened in the past, as in “The board seems ...