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Paco2004 Posted 21 years ago
Grammar

Invited us next Sunday

0 Hello Teachers 02br
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00I got a question from an English learner who is a mother of a middle school student in Japan. 02br
00What she asked is if the sentence "My uncle invited us to dinner next Sunday" she found in her daughter's English textbook is grammatically correct. According to her, the sentence was used in the phone dialogue given below. 02br
00 Denis:Hello. 02br
00 Taro:Hello, this is Taro. 02br
00 Denis:Oh, hi, Taro. What's up ? 02br
00 Taro:My uncle invited us to dinner next Sunday. Can you come? 02br
00 Denis:Wow, great ! 02br
00 Taro:Let's talk about it tomorrow. OK ? 02br
00 Denis:OK. Thank you for calling. 02br
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00I thought that "next Sunday" in the sentence would be taken as a modifier of "invited" rather than a modifier of "dinner" if we normally parse it, and so I answered the sentence in question is not correct and it should be changed into "My uncle invited us to next Sunday's dinner". But I 'm not so certain. Could you give your opinion about this? 02br
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00paco 0-
  

Top answer

0The original is fine and natural and the expected form, Paco. 'Next Sunday's dinner' sounds unusual unless it is some sort of pre-planned feast which is already known to the listener. 0-

— Mister Micawber

  • 0The original is fine and natural and the expected form, Paco.
  • 'Next Sunday's dinner' sounds unusual unless it is some sort of pre-planned feast which is already known to the listener.
  • 0-
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18 Answers
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0The original is fine and natural and the expected form, Paco. 'Next Sunday's dinner' sounds unusual unless it is some sort of pre-planned feast which is already known to the listener. 0-
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0 Hello Mister Micawber 02br
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00Thank you for the quick answer. Frankly I am a bit surprised and confused. I know it's a sentence in a dialogue and it may be a phrase very colloquial. But if you try to parse it, how could you parse it? "Dinner" is not a verb but a noun, so "next Sunday" should be a post-modifying adjectival phrase. Right? I have never learned such sort of
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0 Paco - I agree with Mr. M. that the sentence sounds fine and natural, but I'm afraid my parsing skills are non-existent. Does it help any if you think of it as "he invited us [to come] to dinner next Sunday", with the [to come] omitted but understood? 0-
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0 Hello Khoff 02br
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00Thank you for your parsing the sentence. If I can suppose the sentence is formed by an ellipsis of "to come", it seems reasonable to me. You and MM say the original sentence sounds fine to your ears. However, Google gives no hits to "(They) invited us/me/you to dinner next Sunday". So I am wondering if this sentence is so frequently used in everyday
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0 Hello guys 02br
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00I have been talking on this issue with Japanese guys, and one of them proposed a sentence like below: 02br
00 "John gave me two tickets for the ball game next week." 02br
00Does this sound natural to you? 02br
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00paco 0-
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0The ball game sentence sounds common and natural too, Paco, while your latest formation, 'He invited us to have dinner (with his family) next Sunday', is also fine, only sounding a tad more formal. 02br
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00With regard to modification: 02br
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00'This Thursday, he invited me to dinner' -- if it is Saturday, then the time phrase is obviously adverbial
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0 Hello Mr Micawber 02br
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00Thank you for the kind advice. I understand grammar is merely generalized rules extracted from and described about a language spoken by people and the people wouldn't care anything about grammar when they are speaking. So there must be a lot of collocations that cannot be explained grammatically. So it should be wrong to seek a grammatical expl
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0 Hello 02br
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00I found [url="05000"] a site[/url] that is saying some time/place adverbs can post-modify nouns in American English. This usage of adverbs is a quite new knowledge to me, and I could find neither grammar books nor other online sites that explain this kind of adverb usage. So could you help me to know a bit more about it? 02br
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0I would say that its usage is not at all restricted re register, and all of your sentences seem quite natural, if I may adjust them a bit first (in ways not related to the adverbial, I think): 02br
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00"The weather the day after tomorrow will be fine." 02br
00"Japan 01b00in02b00 the years from 2002 to 2004 lacked strong political leaders
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0 01blockquote
00 My uncle invited us to dinner next Sunday. 12blockquote
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00Maybe ... 00 is omitted? from 00.... 0-
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