Example sentences of "[prep] if [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Stinging , biting , their incessant attentions to warm-blooded creatures always raised the question as to their purpose — as if man 's comfort were at the heart of the purpose of creation . |
| 2 | In the waters of the monsoon pools of East Africa it is as if man sees a baboon in the mirror , for the development of baboon societies in the very regions in which human social life must have also evolved seems to reflect in extraordinarily detailed ways the emergence of features otherwise unique to human life . |
| 3 | This is not to suggest , however , that deconstruction in any sense brings another knowledge to bear : rather it involves a critique of Western knowledge that works by exploiting the ambivalent resources of Western writing , as if Marxism were to produce a critique of ideology without the advantage of its science ( which , given the current ambiguous status of Marxist science is not a possibility to be dismissed lightly ) . |
| 4 | Headache as if head would burst with the cough . |
| 5 | It was as if Madame had deliberately placed this story underneath the story of the authoress 's life . |
| 6 | He stopped speaking for a moment , like a man walking who comes to a brink ; perhaps it was an artful pause , but it made the stars , the night , seem to wait , as if story , narration , history , lay imbricated in the nature of things ; and the cosmos was for the story , not the story for the cosmos . |
| 7 | It does look , after all , as if respectability posed the greatest of all threats to the survival of Nonconformity ; the son and grandson of Baptist believers as he was , cousin to a family of ardent devotees of the Worship Street Chapel , William Charles appears to have paid little more than passing lip-service to the cause . |
| 8 | His face moved continually , different expressions rippling and flowing across it as if he really were a sea creature , moved and swayed by the changing tide and currents in water , in continual motion — flickering from smile to grimace to pain to peace , eyelids half rising to reveal a sea-shell sightless crescent of pearly blue-white , lips parting then closing , breaths shuddering and shivering him as if air were too strong and coarse a medium . |
| 9 | It was as if sea and wind together were singing a lament , mourning with a not quite human voice , the voice of water echoing in a sea-cave , weird , unearthly . |
| 10 | Without waiting for his reply , she yawned once more , curled up as best she could , and , acting for all she was worth , let her head loll as if sleep had already claimed her . |
| 11 | And here 's my spout ( Put left hand out as if spout ) |
| 12 | It is n't that God has hoodwinked us into believing , as if rationality were the bait and mystery the hook . |
| 13 | Now it looks as if history may be repeated . |
| 14 | Lentricchia and Eagleton , by contrast , invoke history rather like ‘ the political ’ : an outside , a concrete , that somehow remains exterior to ‘ theory ’ , unaffected by it , capable of enclosing it and even swallowing it up — as if history were in a position to consume theory . |
| 15 | Such an argument , in implying that the problem is simply a question of the lack of history or of its presence , as if history were some undifferentiated entity that could just be added or taken away , stepped into or got out of , skates over the fact that the real question has always focused on the much more difficult issue of what kind of history , and of what status can be accorded to historical thought . |
| 16 | as if history were no more than a dream . |
| 17 | He had an unexpectedly deep voice , as if maturity was not so far off . |
| 18 | So many small rivalries existed between different cliques in the camp and so many of them seemed synthetic that it looked sometimes as if antagonism was essential to human beings as a form of self-expression . |
| 19 | You 're alright at maths , so it looks as if maths might as a scientist possibly might be |
| 20 | He 'd been pleased with his magnanimous administration of justice , but this new development looked as if advantage was being taken of weakness . |
| 21 | which sounds as if parentage counts , but not to the point where it counts for everything . |
| 22 | It is as if Mill was in two minds about it . |
| 23 | When children acquire more than one language at once , they too begin by acting as if Contrast applied at one level only when they themselves are speaking . |
| 24 | We kept our tempers , as if patience was n't something we maintained at the expense of our fading energies . |
| 25 | It really wo n't do to talk airily about businessmen and business women as if emergency pools of these super-executives exist all over the country , ready to plug the numerous gaps left by the incompetence of Noddy and know-nothing councils that are councillors and magistrates . |
| 26 | as if humanity distinguished between the blood of a Jew , or a Pole , or an African , or an Indian — or a German . |
| 27 | It is as if humanity has once more been motivated by its instinctive awareness that its ‘ god ’ was not entirely satisfactory , and as a reaction against the exclusiveness of the male Christ , the female Mary has been taken in an effort to correct an imbalance which represented a completely unacceptable division of the human race . |
| 28 | ‘ Sounds as if friend Gabriel has a bit of a problem . ’ |
| 29 | It is as if literature were perhaps necessarily less susceptible to the temptations of logocentrism than other forms of discourse . |
| 30 | It is rather like feeling that the dark companion of Sirius is somehow less certainly known because we infer its presence from its gravitational effect upon the Dog Star than it would be if we could actually see it — as if gravity were somehow less real than light . |