Example sentences of "[modal v] not [verb] be [adv] [conj] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | Oh Charlie shut her up at , at Chris 's mums funeral , when we went to Chris 's mum funeral , she 's erm , she said something or other about , request something or other about , pointing at the I should n't 've been there really because I did n't know her and Charlie said she felt did n't know her and erm she said oh well Rose never spoke about her , or words to that effect , Chris says the reason our mum never spoke about her cos she never showed her face in here anyway , he said when was the last time you see your mum , at that , she shut straight up like that , her face went , she 'd like saying that I should n't 've been there cos I did n't know her , I mean yet , she ai n't set foot in the house for fucking year like , you know she 's a horrible cow , and like when we went in the church , when we went in the crematorium er you had , she had a nice , big one up on the hill is it Arnold 's ? |
| 2 | The mother of the two children , a toddler and a baby , could not have been more than twenty . |
| 3 | Areas of trapped sediment within these gullies were screened and the bones recovered , but the original position of the scats could not be determined ( Andrews & Evans , 1983 ) , although from the nature of the scat site they could not have been more than 20 metres away . |
| 4 | It could not have been more than three feet deep at the deepest point and as little as six inches in others . |
| 5 | Their teacher was called Miss Honey , and she could not have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four . |
| 6 | It could not have been more than six months old . |
| 7 | They could not have been more than fifteen , but their faces were heavily coated with cosmetics , and they were dressed with a tawdry precociousness which allowed no illusions as to their innocence . |
| 8 | She spoke quite often of snowy landscapes glimpsed through carriage windows and small hands curled up in a muff made of grey fur , even though she could not have been more than three at the time . |
| 9 | She could not have been more than eighteen years old , golden as a kingcup and white as windflowers . |
| 10 | In the previous half-century it could not have been more than a million and a half in all . |
| 11 | Fresh , though he could n't have been less than thirty and Jezrael was still young enough to think that was old . |
| 12 | See , the other week there , I was on beat duty and this wee nipper , could n't have been more than 6 or 7 , came round the corner and says to me , ‘ Fuck off , ya black bastard . ’ |
| 13 | The man moved efficiently past a child who had succeeded in entangling her pony 's reins with her feet and who was being blasted for it by a girl who could n't have been more than sixteen , but was sounding like a woman three times her age . |
| 14 | He could n't have been more than quarter of an hour having his tea . |
| 15 | It could n't have been more than fifty yards from the bank . |
| 16 | Mary was holding a tiny fawn , and it could n't have been more than a few days old . |
| 17 | The whole inlet could n't have been more than fifty yards across , but to Maha it was at least a mile wide , as deep as the ocean , wet and cold . |
| 18 | She could n't have been more than ten then and by our standards would be scarcely more than a child now . |
| 19 | She could n't have been more than thirteen or fourteen but her face was thickly painted and her clothes were frivolous , brightly coloured things . |
| 20 | He could n't have been more than two , three minutes collecting Erlich in South Audley Street , but there it was . |
| 21 | He could n't have been more than five years old , she realised with a sense of shock . |
| 22 | On the other hand , if he had n't been so keen on interfering there would not have been any tension because she would not have been here or even in France at all . |
| 23 | Yet that would not have been enough if President Bush had not thrown away the election and the keys to the White House with it . |
| 24 | You put out the word and it would n't have been long before you knew Vecchi was out of sight . |
| 25 | We knew he was the owner of the club and — while he ca n't have been more than four-foot-nine inches tall — we knew that Soho was run by Maltese gangsters just like him . |
| 26 | ‘ She ca n't have been more than seventy , ’ Barbara said with a hint of anxiety ; she herself was in her middle-sixties . |
| 27 | We made love again , and we must have been tired , because it ca n't have been less than two hours later that I woke up . |
| 28 | Er there 's a sense also in which memories may not be an individual phenomenon but may be a collective phenomena and if you listen to families reminiscing about things or people who 've know each-other for a long time reminiscing about things , different people supply different details , they contradict one-another , they erm fill things in , they say no it ca n't have been then because um because that was the Christmas when Uncle Sydney had his kidney stones and um y'know stuff like that . |
| 29 | But every year , and often more than once , he made the pilgrimage to Kidlington in Oxfordshire and on one of those visits ( I can not have been more than eight years old ) took me to Thame and showed me his name on the board as head boy . |
| 30 | Ali Cemali , who had in the years between 888 and 891 moved on to other posts , was the first appointee to the new medrese and , though his salary is not specified , the course of his career to this point suggests that it can not have been less than 50 akce a day . |