Carlo Caballero wrote:Another good source for this would probably be Jespersen's monumental A Modern English Grammar ("grammar" in the wider sense; he also covers syntax and idiom). There's a copy in the NYPL reading room (or was last time I looked) and I should not think much of any university library that lacked it. I rather think Quirk also covers this sort of thing too. (Cannot recall the title of his book off the top of my head, and haven't time to research it now.)...< amatter of convention, and you'd need to have recourse to scholarly work on English syntax (by linguists like Chomsky or Algeo, rather than stylists like Fowler or Bernstein) to get an answer as to whether some "rules" underlying that convention have been deduced.>>Patricia