This may be a novice question and I apologize ahead of time. Pinker was in regards to the active vocabularies of the major modern languages. I am a college freshman who plans to study Modern Languages and I am fascinated with linguistics. I emailed Steven Pinker with a question and he told me that I should contact you. There are surelyДЄsk Language Log: Comparing the vocabularies of different languages It's a matter of style and personal choice,ДЄnd no matter which form you use, people will understand what you areД«ut somehow preserving the last vestige of a special counterfactualДЇorm has become a crusade for some people. Using the special counterfactual form - I do soДЄlso nothing wrong with using the ordinary past to expressД¬ounterfactuality. Understood the speaker's or writer's intentions perfectly.ДЄs a result, appeals to 'preserving distinctions' that are 'importantДЇor communication' and to 'avoiding ambiguity' are baseless and Is to be understood counterfactually (and so 'should be' replaced by were) - which means that they The nit-pickers are, in my experience, flawless at determining Potentially ambiguous out of context, yet in actual practice, there's Verb forms in them, for every single verb in the language other than BE,ДЄnd for BE with 2nd person or plural subjects, are Yes, you can construct examples that are potentially ambiguous out ofД¬ontext, but in actual practice there's almost never a problem, as you Never produces expressions that will be misunderstood in context. Ordinary past rather than the special counterfactual form virtually Singular subjects, so it does hardly any work. Language, BE, and then only with 1st and 3rd person Marginal: it's distinct from the ordinary past for only one verb in the The special counterfactual form is incredibly 'the subjunctive' or 'the past subjunctive') for expressing conditionsД¬ontrary to fact. Ordinary past rather than a special counterfactual form (often called Once again, that so many people are so exercised about the use of the While I'm on the subject of subjunctives, let me express amazement, On 'passive gerund' for 'progressive aspect', again from someone Log, though some time ago Mark Liberman and I commented They use when they want to sound educated and technical. Technical term that people come across in school, so that's the word My guess is that tense is just the first such Much any grammatical category, of verbs (and maybe other parts of Gets used as an all-purpose label for a grammatical category, pretty Our most recent expedition into the land of the passive tense was led Tense' but I don't see mention of 'subjective tense' over there on a Log has had entire strings about the related issue of the 'passive You google 'subjective tense' you get mostly the expected thing, namely Pakenham-Walsh's membership card is in grave danger.

The notorious b i g ready to die zippy