Example sentences of "[verb] [pn reflx] [to-vb] [prep] [art] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | We spend a decade conditioning ourselves to act in a certain way , with a certain decisiveness , caution , thoroughness , and the result is that we ca n't shake it off at half past six and revert to some more natural state . |
| 2 | For allowing ourselves to look at the report and find the actions , and not just the actions themselves . |
| 3 | If a society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children , incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives , society has itself to blame for the consequences . |
| 4 | After much deliberation and in great sorrow , the family of Don Antonio Beatillo , learned laureate and doctor , glory of the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Naples , have resolved themselves to appeal against the last will and testament of their beloved and revered father , made in January last year , as being composed by the deceased when not in his right mind . ’ |
| 5 | ‘ And I believe that I began then to train myself to listen in the voice of somebody , or look through the outer facade . |
| 6 | In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade , while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun . |
| 7 | The other meaning uses plastered in the type of structure which we have introduced in the present section ; notice that it allows addition of to be ( and that it is parallel in its overall structure to ( 42 ) where there is a non-finite clause complete with subject , verb and object ) : ( 41 ) Clara wants the façade to be plastered ( 42 ) she wants the builders to plaster the façade Let us also take note of a subtle and rather interesting ambiguity , found in : ( 43 ) Oliver imagined her red-haired This may mean that Oliver is allowing himself to speculate on the effect of , let us say , adding a wig to a blonde lady of his acquaintance ( and this may therefore be called the " cosmetic " version ) ; or he may be trying to build a mental picture of someone he has never met ( the " unacquainted " version ) , in which case imagined could be replaced by supposed with very little alteration in the meaning of the whole . |
| 8 | After a time he nerved himself to say to a couple of youngish men , ‘ Have you heard at all about a man called Menzies ? |
| 9 | As Withel tensed himself to turn on the tourist Rincewind lashed out and caught the thief on the jaw . |
| 10 | An unsporting Stratford Herald critic , leaving Shakespeare country for a night out in Coventry , could not bring himself to join in the fun . |
| 11 | Caretaker could n't bring himself to collude with the titter . |
| 12 | Herodotus can not bring himself to believe in a story which gives as the cause of centuries of rivalry ‘ nothing worse than woman-stealing on both sides ’ ( 42 ) , for he does not think the Greeks could possibly have gone to war over anything so trivial , and indeed he appears to concur with the Persian view that ‘ no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be ’ ( 42 ) . |
| 13 | Twenty years later , after including a pledge to abolish the Lords in the 1983 manifesto and dropping it from the 1987 manifesto , the Labour party again committed itself to reform of the Lords : now they planned to replace it with an elected chamber designed more to reflect the diversity of the nation and the regions , but with less legislative power . |
| 14 | If the Byzantine Empire would ever bring itself to unite with the Empire of the West . |
| 15 | I wondered whether it was because neither of them had stirred herself to go through the contortions attendant upon attracting men , but it was n't that . |
| 16 | Then before she resumed her snail-slow progress back to bed she steeled herself to look in the mirror above the washbasin . |
| 17 | ‘ It is that hard , ’ he said ominously , and I thought of John Maggovertski 's sadness for a pretty girl who had whored herself to pay for the white powder . |
| 18 | Where was such-and-such street , I asked , or the beautiful shop where my mother regularly bought her hats and gloves , or the church with the gilded domes , or the cake shop which had such a show of delicate confections at Christmas time , or the butcher 's where I could hardly bring myself to look at the great sides of dead meat hanging on hooks , or the musty bookshop , smelling of dust and leather , kept by the bent old man whose white hair seemed to be falling off the back of his head , leaving his bald crown all shiny and hopeful and new ? |
| 19 | Neither Bill nor Winifred could bring themselves to lie about the provenance of the gifts they found in the stockings . |
| 20 | How strange , she thought , that such normal , pleasant people could bring themselves to believe in the existence of God . |
| 21 | I wonder how you can bring yourself to work for the society . ’ |
| 22 | They suggested that the repeated occurrence of similar losses might increase the likelihood of believing oneself to blame for the event . |
| 23 | Alexei allowed himself to dwell upon the knowledge which he had retained from that long-ago survey briefing . |
| 24 | When discussing a passage in Dorothy 's German journal , where she states that she ‘ carried Kubla to a fountain in the neighbouring market-place , where I drank some excellent water ’ , one editor allowed himself to speculate upon the existence of a missing manuscript copy of Kubla Khan . |
| 25 | For a few moments Sandison allowed himself to take in the figure before him and he ignored what had been said . |
| 26 | It took some time before Willie allowed himself to relax in the water . |
| 27 | And to top it all off there were the dispiriting revelations that Liverpool 's manager Graeme Souness , had not only phoned his congratulations through to John Major from his private hospital bed , but also , allegedly for mega-bucks , allowed himself to appear on the front of the Sun on the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster with his tongue down the throat of a former TV hostess . |
| 28 | The new government pledged itself to deal with a range of serious environmental problems affecting the country , the extent of many of which had only come to light after the collapse of communist rule . |
| 29 | From what her mother had told her the experience would be horrendous and she had cried herself to sleep for the past week thinking about it . |
| 30 | Then , at last feeling fairly safe , she allowed herself to sink into the nearest chair , totally drained by everything that had happened since she had woken up this morning . |