Grammar Secrets by Caroline Taggart

Author:Caroline Taggart [Collins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007591312
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Are you calling me a liar?

Knowing about transitive and intransitive verbs should help you distinguish between two common words that are frequently confused: lay and lie. Most (but not all) of the confusion can be sorted if you know that lay is a transitive verb, and lie an intransitive one. You lay one piece of paper on top of another; you lay the table or, if you are a bird or a platypus, you lay an egg. But you always, in the present tense, lay something.

On the other hand, you can lie on the floor or lie through your teeth, but the verb is complete in itself – again, the endings of those sentences answer the questions where or how, but not what.

The past tense and past participle of lay are both laid (He laid the table for breakfast, then went to collect the eggs that the hens had laid overnight).

The difficulty arises with the past tense of lie. If you’re telling lies, you’re fine, because in the past this is lied (He lied or He had lied to get out of trouble). In the sense of to lie down, the past participle is lain (He had lain in the sun for so long that his back was scarlet).

But the simple past tense of lie is lay:

I lay on my bed until I felt better.

Yes, that’s right. The present tense of one of these verbs is the same as the past tense of the other.

There may not seem to be much logic to this, but that can be said about a great deal of the English language. Sometimes you just have to accept that this is the way it is, learn it and try to remember it. The rules about lay and lie come into this category.

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