[lbo-talk] VERY off-topic: for the English teachers (probably not profs)

[123hop at comcast.net]

I think the short answer is that english grammar is the result of trying to fit english practice into Latin grammar: sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.

It's kind of fun if you like that kind of thing. I do.

Joanna

----- Original Message -----
From: "SK" <seth235 at yahoo.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 12:18:01 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] VERY off-topic: for the English teachers (probably not	profs)

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20111017/012375.html
> A friend of mine had a squabble with her grammar professor and wants me, as a native English-speaker, to say she's right. The question under dispute:


> Is a past participle a verb or an adjective in the passive?

The Part-of-Speech guidelines for the Penn Treebank, a corpus annotated for
part-of-speech and syntactic information,  might be of use here:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~treebank/

ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/treebank/doc/tagguide.ps.gz

page 17, "JJ or VBN"
"The distinction between adjectives (JJ) and past participles (VBN) is
often very difficult to make. There are a number of tests that you
can use to decide..."
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