Neil Coffey's Profile

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  • Asked on March 1, 2021 in Other.

    In various cases where you evoke the mental notion of a “channel” or “connection” that potentially makes something available, the choice of preposition is “to”: It

    is accessible/associable/perceptible to visitors/humans.

    Often, in such cases (including yours), words like ‘for is often possible’, but is often… evoked from the point of view of or for the benefit of. Also both alternatives are grammatical but evoke subtly different ideas. In this particular case, the likely idea that needs to be expressed is that of “simple availability”, and probably for that reason, speakers would tend to opt for “to” in this case.

    The use of the infinitive usually indicates the same subject as the previously expressed

    • subject, whereas in this case, it would not be the public that was doing the cleaning (this isn’t a hard and fast rule: it’s perfectly possible to have the implied subject of an infinitive be different to one previously expressed, but this tends to happen where there is a very clear or “default” subject intended); the use of ‘to’ with the infinitive strongly suggests the initiation of an action; there is

    Compare your sentence with the following, where if you apply the factors above, the balance swings in favour of a verb:

    “Most libraries are open to the public in their leisure.”

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  • Asked on February 28, 2021 in Other.

    What you actually said about “It is removed” to your ears, or otherwise sounds like you’re saying “It is regularly/habitually removed” in English. expressing an action that generally occur rather than the state of something that has been removed on a single occasion.

    I believe some people will probably say that “it has been removed”. For the

    meaning of that, I would stick to “It has been removed”.

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