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FEATURE
Introducing the New Edition
of the Macmillan English Dictionary
COLUMNS
British and American culture
Email and text messages
New
words of the month
Spending can seriously damage your wealth
new words and finance
MED Profile
Interview with Michael Rundell
Your questions answered
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In this section of the magazine, from time
to time, we'll be sharing with you questions which have been sent to us.
You may find that you've had the same queries yourself, or that your students
keep coming up with similar questions. But if you feel that you still
have a few more lexical questions that you'd like to get off your chest,
fill in this form and we'll get back
to you!
This month the answers are provided by Elizabeth
Potter, freelance lexicographer and author of the articles on 'Word
Formation' and 'Metaphor' in the Macmillan
Essential Dictionary.
Your questions
answered |
until |
To me, only the first
of these two sentences is grammatically correct. As for the
second, the wrong preposition is used. I also believe that
the sentence is non-standard English.
You can raise any objections by 8 August.
You can raise any objections until 8 August. |
This is correct. In time expressions, until
means happening up to a particular point in time and
then stopping. In the example sentence, rather than
a process that is happening up to a particular point in time,
we have a deadline: you will only, presumably, raise any objections
once, and you have to do that before 8 August. Here are some
more examples, taken from the Macmillan
English Dictionary:
Baker is expected to be here until
the end of the week (=he will be here all week and will leave
at the end of it).
I was employed by a manufacturing company until
1999 (=I was employed up to 1999 but not after it).
Up until now, everything in Katherines
life has been taken care of for her (=all the time up to the
present time).
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singular
or plural? |
I understand that
according to British English usage, we say There is
an egg and two marbles on the table. What I would like
to know is whether is or are should be used if the sentence
is rephrased as follows:
On the table is /
are an egg and two marbles. |
It would be very odd to say On the table
are an egg and two marbles because the plural verb
sounds odd coming immediately before the singular noun
'an egg', even though the subject of the sentence is
plural: 'an egg and two marbles'. But it doesn't
sound great to say On the table is an egg and two marbles
either, because of that plural subject. On the table
is an egg is OK, if a bit odd, but then you have two
marbles coming along and complicating matters. So you could
invert it and say On the table are two marbles and an
egg. That way you have a clearly plural verb with a
clearly plural subject and everyone will be happy. It's
still not very elegant, though.
In a sense these are false dilemmas, however.
The point about writing is to communicate your ideas as clearly
and unambiguously as possible. So if a structure sounds awkward
or is ambiguous or inelegant, you should avoid it by expressing
what you want to say in a different way. In this case, that
would mean going for the first version of the sentence.
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anxious |
I would be grateful if
you could let me know whether it is true that absolutely
anxious is grammatically wrong. I have been told this
by a friend of mine but on the Google website, I can find
many examples of this phrase being used. Can I conclude that
my friend is wrong? |
In a sense you are both right, but your
friend is more right. Absolutely anxious is not grammatically
wrong, but it is an infrequent collocational choice, and as
such sounds odd. As a teacher and lexicographer I would say
that absolutely doesnt collocate with
anxious. Generally speaking, absolutely
collocates with adjectives whose meaning is much stronger,
such as terrible, disgusting
and fantastic.
If you search on Google you will indeed find
some citations about 770 for the chunk absolutely
anxious. Compare this, however, with 226,000 for absolutely
disgusting, 447,000 for absolutely terrible,
2,200,000 for absolutely fantastic, and you
will see that 770 is not very many.
Collocational information is not by any means
an absolute science or a set of rules; rather it is a statement
of linguistic preferences, based on evidence of use. You can
put any words you choose together like Chomsky you
can say that ideas sleep furiously if you want to.
But the fact is that not many people do ever say that, and
the pairing will sound odd (as it was intended to do).
Anxious tends to collocate
with words like very, extremely
and terribly; so if you want your English
to sound natural, choose one of these. As for the choices
of those who produced those 770 citations well, from
looking at the first few, Id say that many of them were
produced either by non-native speakers of English, or in rather
specific technical contexts. This is a good reminder that
what you find on the Web should always be treated with a measure
of caution.
To read more questions and
answers, go to the Index
page. |
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