Example sentences of "[noun] [is] [coord] a [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | The characteristic gaudy beak of the puffin is but a summer adornment , and is shed in winter . |
| 2 | Richard is but a child of eleven — 't is fitting and right that he should join mama and our sisters . |
| 3 | On paper , at least Renault is but a heartbeat away from having the most impressively modern and comprehensive range of cars in Europe . |
| 4 | These men , either forgetting or not realising that work is but a component of life and not a reason for it , are likely to have spent too much time working , to the exclusion of family and leisure activities . |
| 5 | In China and Tibet , the Dragon is but a transposition of the Serpent . |
| 6 | It was they who made very clear how the body is but a reflection of the life force within it . |
| 7 | A human life-span is but a blip on the screen of evolution , and the current sea-bird problems may be little more than that . |
| 8 | At its crudest the conservative-historical approach to permissiveness is but a mourning for a lost ‘ golden age ’ , an expression of grief for the passing of a time when questions of morals supposedly appeared much simpler , more straightforward and certainly less contentious and open to question . |
| 9 | ‘ Your Grace , my father is but a merchant , and to marry me into this noble family he gave me a noble dowry , eight hundred marks . |
| 10 | The stereo system is standard , but it is particularly complex to operate , even after practice , and the sound quality is but a shadow of that fitted in the version of the car six years ago which was , quite simply , the best I have ever experienced . |
| 11 | Man is but a reed , the most feeble thing in nature ; but he is a thinking reed . |
| 12 | Merrily , merrily , merrily , merrily , life is but a dream |
| 13 | merrily , merrily life is but a dream |
| 14 | What , what about row , row row , row , row , the boat gently down the stream , merrily , merrily , merrily , merrily life is but a dream Ant do you wan na sing row , row , row , row the boat gently down the stream ? |
| 15 | life is but a dream |
| 16 | ‘ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : |
| 17 | Again he said , in an argument strangely reminiscent of Erastus , Richard Hooker and Matthew Arnold , that ‘ the State is more sacred than any Church … for the State stands for the whole people in their manifold collective life ; and any Church is but a fragment of that life , though one of the most important fragments ’ . |
| 18 | Yet in public cinemas we , the customers , watch film in the shadowy company of an anonymous crowd , each one of whom , like us , lives a life of which cinemagoing is but a part . |
| 19 | It can still muster the mightiest fleet in the Known World and its armies are rightly feared by its foes and yet the realm is but a shadow of its former self . |
| 20 | From milk to money is but a step . |
| 21 | The only reality of the event had been her mother 's reaction , which was silent , grim , and grudging to the last ; not a tear did she shed , and after the funeral , as she turned away from the graveside and started to walk slowly through the cemetery mud she set her mouth in that prophetic way , and straightened her thick body , and then , as she passed a gravestone announcing that death is but a separation , she opened her mouth and said , " Well , he 's gone , and I ca n't say I 'm sorry . " |
| 22 | The erosion of values and moral standards , the relativism of life , the shocking things that happen , reveal that our civilization is but a veneer that hides a viciousness and rottenness that frighten us all . |
| 23 | The sentence is itself ‘ redundant ’ with respect to the opening sentence of Beckett 's Malone Dies which it self-consciously imitates , and the implication is that all discourse is but a re-hashing of another 's words . |