English Consulting

Hello, my apologies for having overlooked this question of yours that you asked so long ago. First, I believe you mean "while" and not "why" in your sentence and also either "draws," present tense or "drew," the irregular past tense of "draw." Plus I suspect the last word was omitted, that is, I believe your whole sentence is something like "The boy drew portraits of people why waiting for an aeroplane at the airport."

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As to your specific question, the reason we don’t have the definite article "the" before the noun portraits is (1) it’s the first mention of the noun and (2) in the case of (1), for plural countable nouns like "portraits" from "portrait" we don’t use any article at all (though we could use "some" here, but again, no article is needed). Compare, for example, "The boy drew a portrait" where we must use the indefinite article "a" since "portrait" is singular, not plural.

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So it is true that the noun "portraits" in your sentence is post-modified by a prepositional phrase ("of people") which normally requires the preceding noun to be definite (i.e., "the portraits" instead of just "portraits"), but the larger context of the sentence is what overrules this principle here, namely again that this is presumably the first mention of these portraits the boy is or was drawing, so we signal that by having no article before portraits; "The boy drew the portraits of people…," by contrast, would imply that the portraits have already been introduced and mentioned in the discourse, i.e., the conversation or the writing.

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Vielen Dank, Rajana. I would be glad to try to help you, but I have some questions first. In your first message, you wrote that you need to "write my text," but then you refer to a "test" on Tuesday; also in, this message I'm replying to here, you mention "1 english exam." So will you need to write those two passages, i.e., about a partner and where you have lived, during the period of your exam/test on Tuesday or do you have to bring the two completed written passages with you *before* you do Tuesday's test/exam?

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Also, in your message about the first question you say must "use this words in this text: (looks, likes, dislikes, hobbys, education, character, social status, job...)." O.K., what you have in the parentheses look more like topics than specific English words you must use; were you give a list of English vocabulary items that relate to these topics?

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Similarly, for the second question you include the direction "How are the people, the food, the shops, transportation, culture, public, art, politics?" So once again I'm assuming these are the general aspects of the topic you must write about, and once more I'm curious if you've been given vocabulary to help you write about these things.

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Please contact me at my tutoring site http://mccorduck.cc/chegg which is where I usually help students with writing. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, so I hope I'll be able to give you the help you need.

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O.K., because you have "and" between "an integrated approach" and "teaching vocabulary to English learners," you list two *very* general, broad topics, both of which by themselves are much too general, I think, for a single essay.

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Maybe you meant to write "an integrated approach to teaching vocabulary to English learners" or "an integrated approach for teaching vocabulary to English learners," using either the preposition "to" or the preposition "for" to head the prepositional-phrase complement of "approach." Either choice would be a good way to limit your topic to make it less general and more appropriate for a single essay, and also grammatically either preposition fits because the next word, "teaching," is already in the gerund form of the verb "teach" which is required after prepositions.

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There is a slight difference in the meanings of "approach to teaching" and "approach for teaching," however. If you use "to," the implication is that you may not yet have decided on how to deploy the approach yet but may be considering the approach more theoretically, whereas "approach for teaching" implies that you have decided on a definite approach and will describe it in detail in your essay. So choose which preposition to use based on what your own essay is really about.

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Sure, well first, I'll make the assumption that by "EL" you mean "English learners." And it really goes without saying that teaching vocabulary is important in learning any second language as the lexicon is one of the two main components of any language along with the grammatical system. Opinions differ on how best to teach vocabulary, some favoring a traditional, rote-memorization approach largely separated from actual communicative context, while others maintain that the only effective way to teach vocabulary is the same way that people learn the vocabulary of their first language, through real-world interaction. Proponents of the latter approach, however, tend to overlook some of the special situations and needs of second-language learners, such that perhaps an integrated approach is best, i.e., one where explicit instruction in vocabulary items is often if not absolutely necessary then at minimum highly desirable, without losing sight of the essential utility of any human language and thus the ideal goal of second-language learning and instruction, to foster learners' ability to communicate in the real world, incorporating both expressing one's own thoughts as well as comprehending the language of others in appropriate contexts.

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All right, first, I'm guessing that you meant "misery" instead of "misary," which I don't believe is a word in English. And technically even prepositional phrases (i.e., ones where a preposition like "in," which governs a noun phrase, is the head of the phrase) can function as adverbials in that these can supply information typically provided by words that are morphologically adverbs. For example, sentences can contain adverbials of time in the form of adverbs (as in "These people work quickly") or prepositional phrases (as in "These people work in the morning") and adverbials of manner also as adverbs ("These people work diligently") or as prepositional phrases ("These people work with passion").

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Now, there is an adjective "miserable" corresponding to "misery," so we could say "These people live miserably," i.e., using the regular adverb form of this adjective. The problem is that there isn't a strict semantic equivalence between "misery" and "miserable"; that is, "misery" could refer to a state of extreme emotional unhappiness, but it could also refer to a condition of poverty or other dire physical want, which is the meaning I suspect your example was meant to convey (again, if I'm right about your intending this and not "misary"). But normally in English "miserable" and "miserably" are about emotional states only, with no strong implication that the referents are materially poor. That is, to say that "They live miserably" is more likely a comment on these people's attitudes and dispositions in their daily lives, feelings that *might* be occasioned primarily by difficult economic circumstances, but not necessarily so.

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"Nominative" generally refers to the case of the grammatical subject in most languages, often--but not necessarily--pertaining to the agent or "doer" of the action of the main verb. In some languages, the nominative case has specific inflection, as in Latin "amicus videt amicum" '(the) friend sees (a) friend' where the nominative ending "-us" marks the first instance of the noun "amic-" as the grammatical subject of the sentence whose verb is "videt" 'sees', in contrast to the accusative case ending "-um" which marks the second occurrence as the direct object of the verb. (And because languages like Latin rely so heavily on inflection to mark sentence roles, word order is much freer, i.e., one could also convey the same meaning '(the) friend sees (a) friend' by various permutations of "amicus videt amicum," e.g. "amicus amicum videt," "amicum amicus videt" and "videt amicum amicus.")

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In other languages, however, like English, the nominative case/role is not specifically marked but is more a functional designation. Thus in "The friend sees his friend," both the instances of "friend," i.e., as the heads of the noun phrases "the friend" and "his friend," respectively, are identical morphologically and it is only the word order that tells us that the first "friend" is the subject or is used in the (really nonexistent) "nominative case" and the second, which comes after the transitive main verb, is in the accusative or "objective" case. (One exception to the general principle that English has no case inflection is with personal pronouns. Take for example "He sees him" where "He," as the grammatical subject, obligatorily shows "nominative" case, whereas "him," as the direct object, is in the objective/accusative case, which in fact consists here of the use of a morphologically distinct or "suppletive" form; compare also the nominative/objective pairs "I"/"me," "she"/"her," "we"/"us" and "they"/"them," which also evince suppletion, i.e., one can hardly make the argument that there is a distinct "accusative" inflection in English.)

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Finally, it should be noted that the so-called "nominative" case may be used for other sentence elements besides the grammatical subject. With linking verbs, for example, the element coming after the verb is usually described as the subject complement in that it is normally co-referential with the subject, e.g., "I am his friend" where "his friend," unlike in the example in the previous paragraph, is here said to be in the "predicative nominative." This analysis had led many authorities to insist that in a sentence like "It is me," the objective "me" is "incorrectly" used and should be replaced by the nominative "I," but this contradicts centuries of actual English usage.

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Actually, I would think that "Faustus" looks more like a Latin/Roman name, but that's not really too important here. Of your three choices, "Faustus bag," the one without any apostrophe at all, would definitely be incorrect for indicating possession by Faustus (but not necessarily always incorrect, e.g., if there were a line of bags known by the trade name "Faustus," then "Faustus bag" would be correct on the reading of "Faustus" as a proper noun functioning as an adjective premodifying the noun "bag").

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Of your two remaining choices, with the apostrophe either preceding the possessive (a.k.a. genitive) inflection "s" ("Faustus's bag") or following the final "s" of "Faustus" ("Faustus' bag"), both ways are generally regarded as acceptable in Standard Written English. The choice really depends on how one pronounces the possessive form of "Faustus." After nouns ending in a sibilant like [s], many English speakers will chose to insert an unstressed vowel, sounding like "ih" or "uh," before the possessive inflection, thus changing the two-syllable "Faustus" into the three-syllable "fow-stuhs-sihz." If this is the pronunciation, then "Faustus's" is the preferred way to write this.

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However, many other English speakers prefer not to add "s" to nouns ending in a sibilant at all to make the possessive (or plural) form, especially, as in the case of "Faustus," if such nouns are names (i.e., proper nouns). In this case, "Faustus' " would be the possessive form, and it would be pronounced identically to the singular "Faustus." However, other English speakers will still pronounce " Faustus' " as "fow-stuh-sihz," i.e., as though the possessive inflection were written as " 's "; there is considerable variation in actual usage.

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O.K., thank you for the clarification. All right, the "the + COMPARATIVE . . . the + COMPARATIVE" construction in English expresses proportionality, that is, "the A . . . the B" indicates that the more A increases, improves, accelerates etc. a proportional effect will be true on B. So in "The more I visit Paris, the more I love it" the implication is that if I visit Paris X times, my love for Paris will be greater by X times (though it may not be possible to devise an exact proportion or ratio that is true for all such sentences containing this construction). It should also be noted that by "COMPARATIVE" we don't just mean higher-degree comparison as expressed by "more" but also also lower-degree comparison as expressed by "less." That is, it is quite possible to say "The less I practice, the less skilled I become." We can even mix higher- and lower-degree comparison in this construction, i.e., "The more I talk to him, the less I like him."

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As for the grammar of this construction, it should be noted that the "the + COMPARATIVE . . . the + COMPARATIVE" construction is syntactically a correlative, that is, it links together elements of a phrase or a sentence into a single unit, elements which cannot be omitted without changing the meaning and/or resulting in an ungrammatical construction. Other types of correlatives in English are "either . . . or" as in "Either John or Mary will pay him" and "as . . . as" as in "as corrupt as the leadership has become."

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But the syntax of "the + COMPARATIVE . . . the + COMPARATIVE" construction is rather unusual in that it works by extracting some element of a clause (which is often not expressed explicitly but merely understood as in the English proverb "The more, the merrier"), putting it into the comparative form, i.e., using either the comparative inflection "-er" or putting "more" before it for adjectives and adverbs, or using just "more" for nouns or noun phrases or verbs (or using "less" in all these cases for lower-degree comparison) and then "fronting" it or putting it at the beginning of the clause preceded by "the." The range of sentence elements that be put into the comparative and fronted in this manner is wide, and here are some examples:
--adjectives as subject complements: "The more embarrassed she becomes, the redder her face gets." (cf. "She becomes embarrassed" and "Her face gets red")
--nouns as direct objects: "The more gold he finds, the more treasure he seeks." (cf. "He finds gold" and "He seeks treasure")
--adverbials: "The less off the grid I live, the more I appreciate technology" (cf. "I live off the grid" and "I appreciate technology much")

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I hope this helps you in some way. Thank you for asking me your question through Ask.fm.

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Hi, thank you for asking me your question. Unfortunately your sentence "they no coming to the party this evening" does not comply fully with the rules of Standard Written English, one reason being that as a complete sentence it should begin with a capital letter, i.e., the "t" of "they" should be upper case "T."

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But a much more important reason that your sentence is not "correct" or "grammatical" is it does not follow the rules for negating a declarative (or "normal" or "unmarked") sentence in English, which are notoriously complicated and unusual for non-native speakers to learn. Specifically, unlike many other languages we generally cannot negate a declarative sentence simply by adding a negative particle like "no" directly before the verb as your sentence does, but instead before adding "not," the negative particle we in fact use for sentence negation, we usually must introduce a form of "do"--and transfer to it the appropriate tense from the main verb of the declarative sentence--and then put "not" between the new auxiliary verb "do" and the main verb (as we do with other auxiliaries in English, e.g., "They should not come" and "They will not come"). Thus, the "correct" negation of "They come" is "They do not come," or more informally "They don't come."

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A secondary grammatical issue is that in your original sentence you have as the main verb the present participle "coming," but in English this does not count as a "conjugated" or "finite" verb, meaning that it requires an auxiliary, in this case a form of "be" to form what is known as the present progressive (or "present continuous") aspect. In other words, the correct affirmative version of your sentence would begin "They are coming . . ." and especially in the spoken language either "are" or "not" is contracted with another element of the sentence, hence in the negative version one would be most likely to hear either "They're not coming" or "They aren't coming" instead of "They are not coming," though the last is perfectly acceptable, if not preferred, in written English.

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