New Forum member Benedict registered for Forum membership last November 15, 2018 and sent these three very interesting grammar questions to my Personal Messages box. Alas, they lay there buried, unread, and unanswered for far too long! To avoid such regrettable delays in my response to questions, please read my formal advice to Forum members at the tail end of my answers to the questions.
Now I’ll take up Benedict’s grammar questions in reverse chronological order:What “for all she knew” and “make a run for it” meanQuestion by Forum member Benedict (January 15, 2019):I’ve read the sentences below from X-Men comics and can’t figure out the meaning of the phrases “for all she knew” and “make a run for it.”
“And she’d been set up. And for all she knew Gambit was a part of the setup, too. She decided to make a run for it.”
Hope you can help me on this.
My reply to Benedict (January 27, 2019):The phrases “for all she knew” and “make a run for it” are popular figurative expressions largely used in colloquial interactions, which of course are to be expected in the comics medium.
IMAGE CREDIT: UNCANNY_XMEN COMICSWhen someone thinks or says “for all she knew,” that person really doesn’t know all the facts about a situation but strongly suspects or believes that her conclusion about is correct.
And when that person decides to “make a run for it,” it means that she decides to get out of, break away, or escape from the situation at once, certain that she’d been set up and that the character Gambit most likely was involved in setting her up.
The difference between the prepositions “of” and “for”Question by Forum member Benedict (January 15, 2019):May I ask what preposition should be used in the statement below:
“Attached here are the data tables
of/for the KAP Study on HIV, for your review.”
Should it be “of the KAP Study” or “for the KAP Study”? And could you please explain why one of them is grammatically correct and the other is not?
My reply to Benedict (January 27, 2019):There’s a rather close equivalence in the semantics and sense of “Attached here are the data tables
of the KAP Study on HIV, for your review” and “Attached here are the data tables
for the KAP Study on HIV, for your review.” For this reason, I think few knowledgeable English speakers of even strict grammarians would raise a howl if the two constructions are used interchangeably.
However, I think “for the KAP Study” is the scrupulously correct usage, where the preposition “for” is used to indicate
the purpose of the KAP Study on HIV: “Attached here are the data tables
for the KAP Study on HIV, for your review.”
The preposition “of” is used in the other sentence construction as a function word to indicate belonging or a possessive relationship: “Attached here are the data tables
of the KAP Study on HIV, for your review.” The belonging or possessive relationship between the KAP study and the data tables is, I think, a tenuous or weak aspect in the context of that statement, but is nevertheless grammatically defensible if challenged.
The tense for reporting verbs in reported speechQuestion by Forum member Benedict (November 23, 2019):May I ask which of the statements below are correct?
A: “Sir Gino
said he found it a little too high given the budget allocated to it.”
or “Sir Gino
said he had found it a little too high given the budget allocated to it."
B: “I
attached the said document here for your reference.”
or “I
have attached the said document here for your reference.”
My reply to Benedict (January 27, 2019): The statements in Set A above involve the choice of tense for reporting verbs in reported speech. When the reporting verb in reported speech is in the simple present tense, the operative verb in the reported statement remains unchanged; often, only the pronouns in the quoted statement are changed.
Below is a chart for the general rule for changes in the tense of the reported utterance for various tenses of the reporting verb:
When the reporting verb is in the past tense, the so-called
normal sequence-of-tenses rule generally applies for the reported utterance itself:
it takes one step back from the present into the past. Thus, the present becomes past, the past usually stays in the past, the present perfect becomes past perfect, and the future becomes future conditional. But keep in mind that this rule applies only when the action in the reported statement is a completed or consummated one. When the action in the reported statement is a conditional or a repeated or habitual one, the changes in tense get more complicated.
You’ll get a better appreciation of the peculiarities of the reporting of reported speech by checking out this June 2, 2018 Forum posting,
“Choosing tense for reporting verbs in reported speech.”In the case of the statements in Set B, the scrupulously correct usage is the present-perfect tense “I
have attached the said document here for your reference.” In the present perfect, the action in the sentence (“attached”) has continued from some time in the immediate past up to the present or at the very moment of speaking or writing the sentence.
Check out this October 5, 2017 Forum posting, “Clarifying the usage of the present perfect tense,” to get a clear idea why this is so.
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