"Single" and "Be"

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single loss of life since the Iraq war began.

(2) "that be drawn up" ? What is its tense? Future tense? Meant "that will be drawn up"?

Context:
The plan for a new Iraqi government reflected Washington's desire to speed up the handover of power as attacks against American occupation forces grow more sophisticated and deadly. The Bush administration dropped its insistence that a constitution be drawn up and elections held before the transfer takes places.

Thank you in anticipation.

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Quote:

single loss of life

oristarA- In this context, "single" refers to an individual incident.

[quote]be drawn up [/quote]

Right- that phrase does imply a future tense. It could have said "was to be drawn up", or "would be drawn up"!

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Correct

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Incorrect.

It's a subjunctive, like

"Let it be...", or

"Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread", or

"Be that as it may...."

Not easy to understand for learners, Oristar, but look up "Subjunctive" in your grammar book.

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McTag wrote:

Not easy to understand for learners, Oristar, but look up "Subjunctive" in your grammar book.

Well, would be the same construction in Latin, French and German - those three languages, I know a little bit besides English :wink:

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I'm sorry BTW if I appeared to be rude back then, that was not my intention.

At work, we in my office often say "Correct!" and "Incorrect!" to each other, and we mean it in a jokey way. So sorry about that, I did not mean to be abrupt.

Embarrassed

I should have said "Sorry to disagree, but my opinion is...."

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Thank you all.

McTag, in my grammar book, I found out that is a use of the present subjunctive. Logically speaking, there is no future subjunctive.

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What remains a puzzle now is that I didn't get "elections held". Does it actually mean "elections be held"?
TIA

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Yes, it does. . . when you are going to say two things, here "be drawn up" and "election be held", you can leave out the shared element in the second- usually a verb or a "the" or so.

For the grammatically-minded, that's called elipsis, and the phenomenon that occurs when you have two similarly-phrased clauses is called a parallel structure or parallelism :-)

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Thanks Princess. Smile

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The last question:

Does the "constitution" mean Iraq constitution?

TIA

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Most certainly.

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"Single" and "Be"

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