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Any language-y people...
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
in General Chat
...able to tell me the form of the sentence "I've been waiting for an hour".
I have deduced that it's present perfect cont (?) but I'm not too sure about the fact that there seem to have three (!) verbs there including the auxiliary [have]. Is that right?
If anyone can help, cheers
I have deduced that it's present perfect cont (?) but I'm not too sure about the fact that there seem to have three (!) verbs there including the auxiliary [have]. Is that right?
If anyone can help, cheers
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
E.g. I might have been waiting.
I might have been used to waiting.
And so on. So, in your example 'have been' are the aux verbs, while 'waiting' is the main verb. If you were parsing it, it would be like:
S a a V
(I) (have been waiting)
:yes:
I find it hard to imagine there could be a whole class about syntax
God you can take a degree in that crap?
I tuned out after Briggi's post and that was only a sentence or two
After last year I thought I'd never have to take it again and so wiped it from my memory, unfortunately I think I have to do it again. Hence the :crying:
Cheers TheKoG. Heather I don't envy your course AT ALL after being completely flummoxed by even the stuff he has to learn/is expected to know. Wow.
Oops, I hate to be the bearer of bad news :razz:
It does seemingly go into syntax in quite some detail with higher level groups, I'm so relieved I just have to glance over the work and not submit crazy language analysis essays and perform micro-teaching slots all over the place just to go and piss about abroad as most people are planning to. Hard work!
Yup.
Thing is, we don't learn this kind of thing in English so I have to translate it into Spanish and then work backwards. Either that or try very hard to recall the murky days when I used to do Latin.
The present perfect requires the auxilliary verb as far as I'm aware.
Present : I wait
Imperfect : I was waiting / I used to wait
Perfect : I waited
Pluperfect : I had waited
Simple future : I will wait
Future perfect : I will have waited
Present continuous : I am waiting
Present perfect continuous : I have been waiting
Pluperfect continuous : I had been waiting
Then you've got all kinds of fun with subjunctives, conditionals etc.
See kids, language can be fun!
God bless Russian for only having three tenses.
Your not alone there.
But then i talk like an idiot anyway and have no grasp of english so only to be expected
Does Greek have a case system like Russian for nouns and adjectives? Since the latter is derived from the former I have a feeling it may but you know more than me...
Do you mean like the name "John" being different in each of the phrases "John is here", "This is John's hand" "This belongs to John" and "John, where are you"?
If yes, then yes.
*copies and saves for future reference* Ta Thunderstruck :thumb:
DON'T quote me on that. It's been a while since I did Latin but I'm pretty sure that's right.
EDIT: Forgot
Future Perfect Continuous : I will have been waiting
Russian is the most fucked-up grammatically language ! I speak 3 languages and the Russian is the one which confuses me all the time, despite it's quite similar to my native tongue. Oh, I almost forgot the French :chin:
I think you've missed out the preterite and put it as the perfect:
Preterite: I waited
Perfect: I have waited
My bad. Thanks.
I reckon they should teach more of the basics of english grammar in school, the only reason I have any idea is because I learnt several foreign languages.
I hate French with a passion. I cant even talk it anymore, everytime on hoilday over there when I had to speak French, I would revert to Spanish.