Is the word "beginning" here a gerund or a present participle, and why?  On June 22, 1941, the armies of Nazi Germany crossed the Soviet border, beginning a war that would claim the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians alike.
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This is a follow-up to a previous question which I am still trying to understand. I think I'm making progress in my understanding, but I would appreciate feedback to help me refine my thinking.  Here is the sentence:     Good writing requires hard work.   Originally, I thought that "writing" was acting as a gerund in this phrase.  After reading through the replies to that question along with back posts related to gerunds, I've since concluded that "writing" in this sentence is a , also termed a deverbal noun.  My reasoning?  —In the sentence above "writing" is modified by "good" and is thus acting more like a noun than a verb. —It has no direct object.  Is my thinking correct here?  If not, could someone politely help me to refine it?  However, what if I had written the following?     Writing well requires hard work.     or   To write well requires hard work.   In these examples, I'm thinking that "writing" would be a different kind of verbal noun—a non-finite verb acting as a gerund or infinitive, which is one piece of a larger complement noun clause.  The last bit is muddy for me, but I will leave it at that. Thank you in advance for your patience and insight.
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Is physicist Robert Oppenheimer's phrase “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” grammatical in English? Why not "becoming" or "now I become"?
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I'm not sure "Being away" is a present participle or a gerund ? If it's a gerund , according to the rule "possessive before gerund" ,then   "I'm used to his being away" should be correct. Am i right ?
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Are 'begin' and 'start' interchangeable? Both &quot;This is a new start&quot; and &quot;This is a new beginning&quot; work, right? Then during games, they say &quot;Let's start&quot;, but I never heard &quot;Let's begin&quot;. So is there supposed to be a difference? And then one guy said this &quot;They could not begin to start a conversation&quot;. What is this supposed to mean? Is it correct?
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Given the following sentences:        I have even started using them in normal writing.   People can understand your writing better.      Are using and writing gerunds, verbs, or some other part of speech?  Context:  I am prefixing the words in some phrases with abbreviations. Some of the words are giving me trouble in classification. (The message is supposed to be an implicit proof of why adding prefixes to table names in a database is terrible. But I'd like to get it right.)  Here's the full set of sentences for your amusement. However, please restrict your comments to the stated question, for the most part.        com-Don't ver-Listen prep-To adj-Those adj-Other nou-People.    pro-You aux-Should adv-Always ver-Use nou-Prefixes prep-With pro-Your adj-Table nou-Names.    pro-I aux-Have adv-Even ver-Started ver-Using pro-Them prep-In adj-Normal nou-Writing.   com-See adv-How adj-Effective pr-It ver-Is?    nou-People aux-Can ver-Understand pro-Your nou-Writing adv-Better!      (where com means command verb)  This question is part of 3 related questions:     This question   It originally came from
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So, I'm writing a paper on the rise of communism in China. At one point I write the following:     "Today, it is well known that communism is responsible for more deaths than even national socialism."   Then, Word corrects it by capitalizing "National Socialism."   Is it always meant to be capitalized? I am simply referencing the ideology, not necessarily the Third Reich. Word didn't bother to correct "communism." I suppose since there was only one instance of Nazism (on a national scale at least) it could be considered a proper noun.
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I know using the bare infinitive after verbs such as hear, see, watch, etc. conveys  a different meaning from using the present participle (verb+ing):        I watched him climbing over the fence ( Climbing wasn't finished at the moment of speaking)   I watched him climb over the fence ( Climbing was finished at the moment of speaking)       I noticed the majority of the Grammar books use past tense to explain the aforementioned difference. Personally, I think that is quite rational because the bare infinitive implies a completed or finished occurrence. This means that event belongs to the past. However, I have a problem conceiving similar sentences in the present tense. For example:   .   The questions is:     If the bare infinitive implies a completed action, then why should we use the present tense to talk about that event? (the event is in the past).      We can say that:      An uneasy feeling came over me as I watched him walk towards the revolving doors     Added info 1  If you think my "climbing" examples are irrelevant, you can check Cambridge Advanced Grammar In Use, page 60, Unit 30, Section D or just check this     Added info 2  My question is from the logical point of view. I think the act of "seeing" is instantly. Therefore, it is not rational to say "see" a "completed process" but, "saw" a "completed process".
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From The Imitation Game (2014), more spefically, from a WW2-era newsreel snippet inserted into the movie to keep the viewer up to date with the events:      "The German Army has fanned out across Europe, From Poland to Serbia, Lithuania to Denmark, Norway to France. The Nazi flag now flies from more than two dozen national capitals. Their campaign mounts in fury as a free Europe crumbles". (The newsreel is in an "old newscaster voice", clearly framed as contemporary with the events; there is some black-and-white historical footage being shown while this voice pronounces the words.)   Why a free Europe and not the free Europe? Everybody knew what the word Europe meant, and everybody knew what the free Europe was: it was the part of Europe not under the Nazi rule. Why introduce it all over again with the indefinite article?  I feel that the indefinite article might be okay here, but I would like to be able to explain this usage to someone else.   Maybe we could read the sentence as a shortening of      Their campaign mounts in fury as the part of Europe that is a free Europe crumbles. ("partitive use" of the indefinite article?)
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Kafka, discovered in the 1920s by the Expressionists, damned by the Nazis in the 1930s and by the Marxists at more or less the same time, was reinvented after World War II by the French Existentialists. They saw in him the father of Angst and the Angst for the father: an Albert Camus before his time.   Can you tell me what the purpose of using the indefinite article before the proper name is in the sentence above. What it be a mistake to write just "Albert Camus" without the article?
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Generally, I've been told that I should maintain consistency of tenses in my writing. That is, if I begin a piece of writing in the past tense, I should ensure that all verbs agree with that through the document. But as I read more articles, books, and other such things, I get confused by the verb tenses used by these other authors.  For example, I copied a portion of an article below. I believe it started in the past tense, yet the second paragraph switched to the present tense (it sounds like the...) In the third paragraph, the past and present usage is mixed (the word gave is in past tense, yet remain is in the present tense). I understand that the writing in the article is most likely correct. But why can it switch verb tenses and be ok while I was told in school by my professor to keep my essays in a single tense? Is there a guideline I can adhere to?      REPRESSED for decades, the anger burst like a summer storm. Rioting   youths flooded city streets. The shaken regime granted hasty   concessions: freer speech; an end to one-party rule; real elections.   But when Islamists surged towards victory in the first free elections   the army stepped in, provoking a bloody struggle that lasted until the   people, exhausted, acquiesced to a government similar in outlook,   repression and even personnel to that which they had revolted against   in the first place.      It sounds like the recent history of several Arab countries: Bahrain,   Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, the states of the 2011 Arab   spring, have seen some or all of the story unfold. But this is also,   and originally, Algeria, a quarter of a century earlier—the first   major political crisis in the age of modern Islamism.      A flurry of freedom in the late 1980s gave way to a vicious civil war   in the 1990s that left as many as 200,000 dead and Algeria’s Islamists   more or less defeated, but not eradicated. Today the country’s   citizens remain powerless spectators to a continued stand-off between   what they call le pouvoir—the entrenched oligarchy that controls the   state, the oil money and the army—and the now-marginalised Islamist   radicals, who serve more as a justification for ongoing repression   than as any sort of inspiration to ordinary people.
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Just the other day, I was talking to my mom about how the people who had been brave enough to take part in world war 2 were people we should look up to. Just the other day, I was talking to my mom about how the people who have been brave enough to take part in world war 2 were people we should look up to.  Are both the above sentences grammatically correct? What's the difference in their meaning.
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What is the difference in the meaning between the following sentences:      Being beaten by snow, he died.     Beaten by snow, he died.    Or:      Being taken to the hospital, he survived.     Taken to the hospital, he survived.    Here are my opinions about them:  When we use Being+past participle as a participle clause, it refers to the reason for the action of the main clause and it replaces 'Because'.  when we use past participle clause as a subordinate clause it also refers to the reason for the action in the main clause. Thus, both(being+p.p and p.p) work the same and their meanings also same in sentences. They convey the same meangs but only their construction is different. I'm not sure,so I'm confused here.  If i understand the usage and meaning of them, my confusion will certainly be eliminated.
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Given the sentence:     Most people who live and work near Washington, DC, would have trouble      imagining dinosaurs walking around the area.   Grammatically, what would ‘imaging’ be called in this case? Present participle or gerund or something?  I mean, if it is a present participle, ‘imagining~’ might be a description of the subject. And if it is a gerund, ‘imagining~’ might be an object of the verb phrase of ‘have trouble’. How do they explain this ‘imagining’ after ‘have trouble’?
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When should one use the word "coming" vs. "going"?  For example, is it "I'm coming home." or "I'm going home."? (Ehhh maybe that was a bad example).  "Are you coming?" vs. "Are you going?" may be a better example.  I always get confused by this expression but most people I notice use the word "coming".
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The 10th and last round of negotiations between Iran and the six world powers was held in Vienna in a bid to strike a final deal. However, after the sides failed to agree on a final deal they decided to extend the negotiations until / by July 1, 2015.   In the original text the preposition until has been written. I am, however, wondering if we could use by instead, if so, is there any difference semantically?  Any help would be greatly appreciated
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Statement is as follows:      Obama makes a surprise visit to Afghanistan.   Is this a simple present tense? If yes then please explain  As per the definition of simple present tense, this statement does not fall into any of the following categories:   For repeated or regular actions in the present time period. For facts. For habits. For things that are always / generally true.   This statement is one of the headlines in the New York Times.
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What's the grammar behind A'warring, from the lyrics of Symphony of Destruction by Megadeth? It's the first time I'm seeing the use of such apostrophe.