shall I was teaching an English teacher and she came to me with a few questions from the textbook. When there's a problem, it generally that some productive pattern has created a grammatically correct sentence but is semantically ill-formed.
here's one from last lesson that had me in stitches. (I took a little memo.) I'm not sure why it was so funny, but I think because I just didn't know what to do with it.
"I shall have studied English for 6 years by next March."
I couldn't stop laughing and I couldn't tell her why it sounds wrong to me. |