Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with sentence

Possessive?

niccolo — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:55:07 -0800

Where should the apostrophe go in the sentence "In Memory of Great Loves Lost"? Loves is plural (referring to all the loving in the world), but does it possess "lost"? Should it be loves'? The closest example is Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost", but people apostrophe it many different ways. I've also tried to find where this example should go on the amazing apostrophe chart that was posted here a while back, but I am still uncertain.

Yes, I'm.

whatzit — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:20:53 -0800

Vagaries of the English Language, part n: I need to tell my boss why the contraction "I'm" cannot stand alone as a sentence. For example, "Yes, I am" is okay. "Yes, I'm" is not. I haven't been able to find any good logic for this case or that works for the different contractions in general ("don't" can also stand alone, "I'd" and "I've" cannot). Given this is about languages, and particularly English, "just because" is, alas, potentially the best answer.

Where the heck does it come from, oh my!

Happy Dave — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:44:52 -0800

Where does the sentence structure 'Something, something and something, oh my!' come from? I'm seeing this everywhere and it's been bugging me. All over the web, I keep seeing variants on 'X, X and X, oh my!' Some examples right here on Ask Me. What's the origin of this phrase? I've been googling in much the same way I did when I figured out what 'All your X are belong to us' and 'I'm in ur X verbing ur Y' memes, but I got nada.

diagram this 94-word sentence

mai — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:41:44 -0800

How do I diagram this sentence? Here is the sentence in question:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

This sentence won the bad writing contest in 1998. Googling reveals several ways of diagramming sentences. I want to diagram it the way a contemporary linguist would, but I'm not sure exactly what that is.

Something to translate?

graymouser — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 08:15:41 -0800

Good sentences for translation practice? I like to do language study, and one thing I find helpful when assimilating vocabulary and grammar is to translate sentences. But I find that books and articles often aren't too easy to translate, because of things like tense, word choice, etc. What I'd like are straightforward, preferably topical, sentences in English that would work well as translation exercises on my own. Are there lists of this that I don't know about?

What's with this sentence structure?

eighth_excerpt — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:45:06 -0800

I'm confused by the sentence structure of "The more I chew, the sorer my jaw gets" and "the heavier the atom, the less it rotates." Do these "The more..the less..." sentences have understood omitted verbs or something? They seem to not have all the prescribed elements of a sentence.

Why do people leave a space before end of sentence punctuation?

Shane — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 12:01:52 -0800

When (and where, and maybe why) did people start doing this ? Is it mostly a UK/Europe thing ? Is it only occasional or a valid trend now ?
(Another question about a grammar anomaly, but I'm not complaining this time, only curious. This one only occurs in informal [Internet] communication and for some reason I enjoy it: a space between sentence end and final punctuation, when punctuation is a '!' or '?' Mostly UK- and Ireland-ers do it, like sgt serenity [a mad Scotsman] here.)