Example sentences of "could only [verb] [prep] a [adj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Warned that she could only stay for a few moments , Laura had sat down quietly in a chair beside the bed , taking her cousin 's inert , pale hand and praying , as she had never prayed before , that Liz would be able to survive her ordeal . |
| 2 | But , he favoured her with what she could only perceive as a reassuring smile when , ‘ I 'm on my way to Mariánské Láznë myself , ’ he commented easily , ‘ so that 's one problem you can forget . ’ |
| 3 | Martin Cruz Smith has an intriguing hero to play with ; if he could only Strive For a Decisive Upswing in Plot Design , his mastery of the chilly thriller would be complete . |
| 4 | Indifferently magnificent , it sneered back at my eager camera lens , which could only fit in a pitiful few floors . |
| 5 | Shakespeare evidently shared Donne 's dissatisfaction with the extant convention , agreed with him that unfulfilled love was a trope that could only lead to a limited number of stereotyped situations . |
| 6 | Hareven , in her discussion of early industrial society in America ( 1978 ) , suggests that this type of exchange was more common than sharing households , but that it could only operate on a reciprocal basis . |
| 7 | So , if we knew that P was the first letter of a word we would know that the second letter could only come from a small group , and that A , E , I , O , and U are the most likely candidates , H and S are less likely but possible , and F and N very unlikely , but not impossible . |
| 8 | A speechless ape presumably has some sort of feeling for the opposition " I " / " Other " , perhaps even for its expanded version " We " / " They " , but the still more grandiose " Natural " / " Supernatural " ( " Man " / " God " ) could only occur within a linguistic frame . |