personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue.html

English Grammar FAQ
As posted to alt.usage.english

These are some of the postings I have made, mostly to the newsgroup alt.usage.english. As a linguistics professor, with a special interest in English and a background including some time as a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, I frequently have to explain how things work to people who don't really know much about English grammar. I don't find it particularly disturbing that people ask questions about English grammar; after all, this is why people ask questions, and this is what I do (in part) for a living. I do find it somewhat disturbing to see how many English speakers are clueless about the realities of English, and how many different varieties of confusion they display, and how often one encounters them.