WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn our English grammar, many of us no doubt were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps while watching a magician perform in the circus, we might have exclaimed "He gone the rabbit!" and promptly got told off by our parents for our bad grammar. When we probably corrected ourselves by saying "OK, he disappeared the rabbit!" (the way we'd say "Teacher dismissed the class early" without being censured), again we'd be chastised for yet another grammatical gaffe. Then, when the magician finally made the rabbit reappear, we might have confidently said "Now he appeared it again!" — sure this time that by using "appeared" (as in the case of "missed" in "I missed class today"), we could no longer be possibly wrong. But as we might have learned to expect, such a sentence construction was unacceptable, too!
So, we might have asked in exasperation, what seemed to be the matter with such verbs? Why couldn't "gone," "disappear," and "appear" behave like the good, old verbs we knew — verbs like "scare," "build," "fix," and "receive"? Like "missed" above, didn't these verbs work perfectly in such sentences as "He scared the rabbit," "Daddy built a tree house," "My brother fixed my bike," and "My sister received a love letter"?
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