Does anyone know of a near-comprehensive list of grammar rules? (Specifically those which a poor writer of English might violate.)  The most amusing candidate I've found was  but that doesn't count ;)
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Before marking this post duplicate or voting to get it closed (the reason for which I simply don't get just because it is a grammar forum after all! If I am seeking recommendation for a book that means I will be coming back someday to the same site for my doubts also provided I get a not so harsh reply!), please read this and help this MBA aspirant.   A little about myself and my research so far. I am a very critical reader of English Grammar and the kind of person who aims at perfection.  Currently, I am keen on taking on English grammar again after a certain gap. Well, I am aiming for MBA, so preparing for entrance exams for the same.  I bought the religiously followed Wren and Martin and started studying it chapter by chapter. I was surprised when I read the pronouns chapter. I studied all the rules given and then started practising but it came as surprise when I found when many of the attempted questions were wrong. The reason simply being the rules for those specific sentences were not given.   For example:     We scored as many goals as they/them?    According to me, the answer should be they, but it's them according to the solution manual. Worse still, the solution manual offers no explanation for this.  So after a chat with my teachers I was suggested to follow the blogs of grammarians and look for any rules for the sentences that have contradictory answers!  I did so and was clarified by  post of pronouns, Rule 5.  Then I saw a book by the same author. I was momentarily happy. It was Momentarily because the reviews on Amazon were too bad about this book. After reading a couple of forums about the book I found a common statement saying that no grammar book is exhaustive.  So, it's okay for me to have more than one. And my simple question is what will be a good and almost exhaustive (if not fully exhaustive) book of English grammar to help get through the subtle usages of English in my management entrances  which is crisp and to the point and yet covers all important rules and syntax, and most importantly having practice tests at the end with solutions and explanations?
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Why do British speakers omit the article in constructions like "go to hospital" or "go on holiday"? Pretty much all American speakers would rephrase those as "go to the hospital" and "go on a holiday", I think. Is there any good reason, or forgotten sense behind those words that might explain why the articles are ommitted?  Are there other common constructions other than those two that the British use that drop the article?  EDIT: I just realized per Kosmonaut's comment that Americans do much the same thing with a few nouns, so this isn't all that special.   Do grammaticists designate nouns that can have their article dropped with anything, i.e. do they have anything in common?
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How can one determine what an adjectival complement is in an English sentence? Are there are any subcategories to this classification? I'd love concrete examples, to help me better understand this aspect of grammar.
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As a non-native speaker of English and an engineer by training, I always get confused about hyphenation and almost always end up referring to Google every time I need to make that decision.  Does anybody know of a concise, comprehensive style guide to hyphenation that explains this rather complex issue, once and for all?
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It would help everyone if we provided a mechanism that people could use to flag their post if English is language they are not comfortably fluent in. A lot of non-English speakers have to go to English forums for tech support and find it embarrassing to ask questions in broken Englis.   Worse, people reading a post often cannot tell if a badly-worded post results from a poor English or just laziness and sloppiness on the part of a native English speaker. Personally, I will take the time to puzzle out a poorly-worded post if I know the author is struggling with English, but if I think they're just lazy and careless I won't bother.   A simple check box could flag the author as a non-English speaker and allow everyone to adjust accordingly.   Edit01:  Some answers below have accused me of being 'elitist'. I'm not sure where they got the idea that I was sneering down at anyone because their abilities at either English or coding. That was not my intent.   When I said I would not bother with post that appeared to incoherent owing to laziness or carelessness, I am not being elitist. I'm giving priority in my time budget to people who are respectful enough of my time to spend the their time writing as clear a question as their grasp of English and coding allows. Why should I spend time answering a careless and slapdash post when I could spend that time helping posters who took more of their time writing their questions?   I am perfectly willing to burn a lot of time helping someone struggling to write code in their non-native language. I have a hard enough time coding myself in English that I can't even imagine what a dog's breakfast I would make of it if I had to code in, say, Korean.    I have seen many instances in which questions have been downvoted when a quick glance at the poster's profile gives a strong hint they are not native English speakers. I would like a system that would spare those posters from being downvoted or ignored by using an interface element that clearly communicates in a standardized way whether the poster natively speaks English or not.   I don't see what's elitist about that.    Edit02:   (original unedited) I'm talking about:     Hy, I have a childe view that put it   self over other brother views. The   problem is that when i touch it the   brother also reacts at the touch   event. How can I disable touch   propagation on the underlieng brother   views?   I'm not even exactly sure what he is describing. I can guess that he has a sibling view that extends over its siblings but I'm not sure. If I edited it, I might not end up asking the same question the poster intended.   To answer the question, I will either have to (1) first ask for more detail and then keep checking back until I get it or (2) try to answer what I think the question is and possibly mangle it then have to come back and edit my answer all the while risking a downvote because I answered the wrong question.   I will take the time and the risk of down vote if the poster is not a native English speaker (or is a child) and the confusing question represents their honest best effort. If they're just being lazy, I have other people to help.   I would like a mechanism that would help me decide how to allocate my time and would protect the non-English speaking posters from unjust downvotes.
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I am studying English in Korea.   All my friends and I are studying about 'sentence patterns'  Sentence patterns, said in here, are S+V, S+V+C, S+V+O, S+V+I.O+D.O, S+V+O+O.C.  But my teacher said these 5-sentence patterns are not perfect in grammar. But  because we don't use English by mother language, they will be helpful for understanding English.  Then, I came up with something.   Is sentence patterns used everywhere? (like U.S.A, U.K, Australia, anyother country where people use english by their mother language?)  I really wonder.
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Have you ever had a case where you felt compelled to include strange things like a double that in a sentence? If so, then what did you do to resolve this?  For me, I never knew whether it was acceptable grammar. However, what I did learn was that it was a logic distractor, could lead to confusion, and therefore should be reworded to avoid this.
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An acquaintance recalled this specific example from an English textbook, but it is jarring to my native ear. Is this an example of prescriptive grammarians gone wild?
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I proposed a programming puzzle, where the question is to generate gramatically correct sentence with the shortest program (see: [).  One suggested solution was "Hello, World!", this is an standard output at a special language where no code is written.   My question is: Can "Hello, World!" be rated as a correct English sentence? My feeling is, that it is not, because there is no verb in it. But since I'm not clear what is the correct definition of a sentence, I want to raise the question to the linguistic experts here.  Edit:  Based on the feedback I got here, there are several different possiblities on how to define a sentence. This was a bit of a suprise to me. Since the answer to this question seems to be opinion based. I suggest to close this question.
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What article should be used in the following sentence?     He was English by [a/the/] blood.   I feel there should be a zero article here, but I was taught that the zero article is impossible in English.
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English, having originated as a germanic language, uses premodifier noun adjuncts (is this the right terminology?) to form compound nouns like "science fiction writer". However, English also says "table of contents", where "of contents" is a prepositional phrase I would think. Now, I write texts or translate and get corrected by reviewers and proof-readers, who are English and serious people, while I am not. For example, recently I wrote "density of water" and was corrected to "water density". It gets worse, I feel, when there are several premodifiers e.g. I wrote "plant of the Cimenterie Nationale d'Haïti" and was corrected to "Cimenterie Nationale d'Haïti plant".  What is the rule? Is there a recommended limit to the number of premodifiers? Perhaps not more than two? Science fiction writer sounds OK. What is the correct terminology talking about this issue?  With many thanks!
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In this post, I am asking for constituency tests to assist me in writing exercises about phrasal verbs for non-native speakers of English.  I respectfully ask that only native speakers answer the questions in this post. Some background --- I am from the U.S. I am currently working as a private English tutor in Brazil.  A common request from my students is an explanation of phrasal verbs.  I have looked at a variety of materials on the subject, and have been thoroughly dissatisfied with all of them.  The materials are either extremely superficial (read: dodging the issue) or so verbose that my students would be terrified.  None of them state how they decided what is a phrasal verb and what is not with any clarity.  One book by a respected publisher actually listed verbs that take both a direct and an indirect object as phrasal verbs. I turned to the academic literature on phrasal verbs.  There is plenty of discussion and controversy, but for the purposes of my exercises I chose to follow the strategy outlined in Clayton Darwin and Loretta Gray's article &quot;Going after the Phrasal Verb: An Alternative Approach to Classification&quot; (TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1). Following Darwin and Gray's strategy has proved helpful for nearly all of the verbs that I want to cover.  However, there are a few that I am uncertain about.  Below I have written some sentences based on their strategy, with the name of the test after each item.  Please indicate your judgment of the sentence.  Thank you in advance for your help.  2 = Sounds OK 1 = Iffy 0 = Yuck!   A. I figured on $1000 for my vacation and on $500 for my cell phone.  (particle repetition test) B. On how much was he figuring?  (fronting test) C. What was the amount of money on which she was figuring?  (relative clause test) D. Mary figured and bet on a good turnout for the event.  (verb insertion test) E. A thief broke into my car and into my house. (particle repetition test) F. Into what building did the thief break?   (fronting test) G. A thief broke silently into our building. (adverb insertion)
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I am always confused about where to put adverbs in sentences. For example, consider the questions below:        Why did they target us specifically?   Why did they target specifically us?   Why did they specifically target us?      I believe all these sentences mean the same. Am I correct? I am always confused about where to put adverbs such as always and specifically, etc. Is there a particular grammar rule for this?  Funny, you see, I can even form the above sentence in different ways.         I always confuse where to put this kind of adverb   Always I confuse where to put this kind of adverb
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Over at stats.stackexchange we are having a minor kerfuffle over whether a title is using incorrect grammar. It has been edited and re-edited several times. It would be great to get some arbitration and a clear explanation.   The original title was "What questions is your data team hoping to answer?" which was edited to "What questions are your data team hoping to answer?", then edited back. See the question .
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In my , I provided the following, problematic,  wording (especially bold italic), and I need help to better understand this issue so I can fix my answer:1          The thing is the books. (Reduced form of Sentence 2.a)         Fundamentally, Sentence 2.a (the so-called "correct" answer), is grammatically defective. Recall there is another grammatical rule: the subject and subject's complement should match in number.    A clarification is needed here. I am not suggesting here, in this EL&amp;U question, that there is any such singular grammatical rule as indicated in the quote above.  The quote continues as follows:     The reduced sentence makes the disagreement between the subject's and complement's plurality obvious. What is one to do? Language is linear and we know "The thing is X" is better than "The thing are X", so we go with the former, which is the subject-verb agreement rule. But what is "the books" then? It must be thought of as a collective noun, even if it doesn't look or feel like one. Forcing something to be a collective noun is related to the idea of notional agreement.   Others noted that grammatically defective is too strongly worded.  There is no such "grammatical rule" for subject/complement agreement.  Please help me understand/improve upon my line of thought here.  I'm stating that Sentence 2.1 presents a fundamental "conflict" or "error" (however one might define error) at some level (morphological, syntax, grammatical, semantic):     The thing is the books.  (Or, "The thing is the objects.")   Based on the "obvious" morphosyntactic plurality conflict, the above sentence feels so wrong that I think many native speakers would think it "simply" grammatically incorrect. However, @F.E. gives counter examples:     And here are some more grammatical examples, where the number of subject and predicative complement don't agree: "They were a problem to us all", "That so-called work of art is simply four pieces of driftwood glued together" (CGEL, page 254-5). As CGEL says: "What is required is semantic compatibility, not syntactic agreement . . .". There are more examples on page 512: "The only thing we need now is some new curtains", "The major asset of the team is its world-class opening bowlers", "Our neighbors are a nuisance", "This gadget is five different tools in one".   I think all the examples given above can be explained as notional agreement.    Question 1: If we explain this phenomena in terms of notional vs syntactic agreement, where does "grammatically correct/incorrect" fit in?  Question 2: Can a simple sentence such as "The thing is the objects." be grammatically incorrect while more complex sentences such as "The thing is four pieces of driftwood glued together." be grammatically correct?  (The answer, in my mind, must be no; this is my conundrum.)  Question 3: Would it be better to say that Sentence 2.a has a low level of (linguistic) ?   Question 4: How about a low level of  and that it's semantically difficult to be (linguistically) ?    Question 5: Do we simply draw a hard line and say "The thing is the objects." is 100% grammatically correct?  I didn't particularly like this option based on intuitive notions of "grammatically correct".    1. Please help me and be kind; I'm trying to improve my understanding. I'm looking for cool, objective advice on how to look at this.  I numbered my questions so they can be easily referenced, if desired.  My preference is the final answer would sufficiently answer all the questions, but of course that can be done explicitly or implicitly.
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As always, while reading through I found a sentence whose structure confused me.  What I want to know is whether the first sentence is the inversion form of the second sentence.      1. If the reason was to avoid bad publicity should his error be discovered, then . . .      2. If the reason was his error be discovered to avoid bad publicity, then . . .   If not, how should I interpret the first sentence?  Thanks.
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I just made a minor , and  the grammar correction was unnecessary.  The original text was     Another factor--sometimes life happens and you can't fly. In the old days you could simply sell your ticket to someone else, now you either have to eat a hefty change fee or lose it outright. That's money in their pockets that they didn't used to get.   It was corrected to:     Another factor--sometimes life happens and you can't fly. In the old days you could simply sell your ticket to someone else, now you either have to eat a hefty change fee or lose it outright. That's money in their pockets that they didn't use to get.    Was this grammatical correction an improvement? Was the original text grammatically correct? Is the edited text grammatically correct?