January 2020 – English Grammar Pro

In the English Grammar Profile, Point 90 in the category of PAST continuous listed as C2, the adverbs ‘always’ or ‘constantly’ are used to talk about repeated events which are undesired or uncontrolled. Frustratingly, an example from point 70 in PAST category at B2 given by the EGP for adverb range pictured below clashes. Surely, […]

Point 91 in the PAST category of the English Grammar Profile, we can give reasons with this structure which collocates with: If it hadn’t been for + up to 9 spaces to the right in the COCA corpus (I changed to this corpus because iWeb and NOW corpora were not allowing or providing much information): […]

How do you express regret?

Point 24 in CONJUNCTIONS “CONCESSIVE to combine sentences, often unexpected” iWeb corpus: And yet + noun (up to 4 spaces to the right) 1 PEOPLE 3320 2 TIME 2111 3 OTHERS 1220 4 WAY 711 5 YEARS 678 6 THINGS 652 7 MAN 603 8 WORLD 560 9 LIFE 552 10 REASON 529 11 DAY […]

Point 119 in clauses collocated in the NOW corpus: 1 IF IT WERE TO BE 115 most of these are followed by a past participle, a search of which are: 1 IF IT WERE TO BE IMPLEMENTED 5 2 IF IT WERE TO BE APPLIED 5 3 IF IT WERE TO BE MADE 4 4 […]

If you want to express something that happened immediately before something else with a very rare expression… Hardly had * _vvn * when 1 HARDLY HAD HE SPOKEN, WHEN 4 Even when searching with 4 spaces to the right on iWeb we get less than 10 strings:

Point 73 under the category of adjectives in C2 on the English Grammar Profile we have two vocabulary items that stand out. “Major” and “very” before a noun. From iWeb corpus: 1 MAJOR CITIES 30699 2 MAJOR ROLE 29774 1 PLAY(ED)(S)(ING) 5 DEVELOPMENT 6 HELPING 7 DETERMINING 8 SHAPING 9 SUCCESS 10 DEVELOPING 3 MAJOR […]

At A2 level, learners can use “that” to refer to things such as a singular group or “team” of people, whereas at B1 “that” can be used to refer to the humans: “people, actors, friends or a girl”. That is what these two points on the English Grammar Profile seem to suggest. The explanations do […]

This is another post that points at overlapping points on the English Grammar Profile. Parts of two points are worded differently but basically locate the same structure for “should” starting a sentence. The only noticeable difference for these points in succession is that one is labelled as conditional and the other located in a “formal […]

One must wonder what the precise choice of collocating nouns is for this point on the English Grammar Profile: 77 ADJECTIVES superlatives C2 USE: ‘the slightest’, ‘the faintest’ with a specific range of nouns to express the least amount possible, most frequently following a negative verb form The word “slightest” already means the least amount […]