Tag «grammar»

Subject / verb agreement mistakes: 7 things to bear in mind.

First things first: What is subject / verb agreement? It’s a grammatical rule that states that the verb must agree in number with its subject. In English, present tense verbs change to show agreement in the third person singular form by adding an S (or ES). Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? So how could it be that …

Things that maybe you didn’t know about despite and in spite of

Last week I attended an interesting talk on the role of corpora in language teaching and it reminded me a small-scale, corpus-based study I carried out in the late 90s as part of my coursework at Lancaster university. Here are some of the questions I sent out to investigate using the British National Corpus: 1. …