Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / July 2006

Thorsten T. Rufus wrote back:

Thorsten, I think that your marks might have been moved around, as I
discovered when I replied to this post that opening your response in a
Google Groups reply box moves your makeshift underlining around. I
suspect, however, that this is not the case.

If  your teacher underlined the section marked above, you're wrong and
she's right. If she underlined the subjunctive part (...not be ruled
by...) then you're right and she's wrong. It is hard to believe that
anyone who teaches the English language to foreigners would not be
exposed to the subjunctive somewhere in their preparation to do this
job.

Precisely why she's right has to do with one of the hard-and-fast rules
of English grammar: except in certain very common collocations/word
groups (go home, in school, in bed, at universty, etc.), singular
countable nouns in English like "system" must be preceded by one of
four different word types: a possessive pronoun (her, his, its, etc.),
a possessive adjective (Mary's, John's, Thorsten's, etc.), an
indicative/demonstrative pronoun (this, that), or an article (a, an,
the, any).

I tend to call this the first Golden Rule of Determiners when I teach
it.