When doing the text editing or writing an essay, I will encounter lots of grammar problems, such as Pronouns, Article, Verbs, Prepositions, Phrases and Sentences. Among those problems how to use verbs accurately is one of the most difficult problems to me. The tense of verbs is one common problem. As verbs are the words used to indicate the tense of a sentence, a verb has different tense forms: present, present participle, past and past participle. Many Verbs acquire the inflection -ed when they are in the past and past participle forms. However, there are verbs that do not adhere to this regularity. They are called irregular verbs. There are some examples: arise-arose-arising-arisen, bid-bade-bidding-bidden, draw-drew-drawing-drawn, hit-hit-hitting-hit. We should pay attention to these verbs or we will make mistakes. Another problem is the Subject-verb Agreement. What we need to pay attention is some trick collective nouns, like committee, company and society. They can be used as singular or plural nouns because they are singular, but logically, they are plural entities. Here is one example:
The committee has decided to go ahead with the merger.
The committee have decided to go ahead with the merger.
However, when the subject is one of …, which is singular, we should use the singular verb form.
2008年9月15日星期一
订阅:
博文 (Atom)
