Example sentences of "can [verb] [been] " in BNC.
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| 1 | What Mr Sutherland can 've been thinking of , I do n't know . |
| 2 | Given the dispersed profusion of Pound 's criticism , neither the choice of what to reprint , nor the arrangement of it when chosen , can have been easy . |
| 3 | Few can have been surprised that the markets reacted by marking sterling down . |
| 4 | If the mark of a reborn evangelical is a devotion to the Epistles of St Paul and in particular to the doctrine of Justification by Faith , then there can have been few Christian converts less evangelical than Lewis . |
| 5 | One approach developed by the environmental group Earthtrust has been the introduction of the voluntary ‘ Flipper Seal of Approval ’ , a sticker attached to cans of tuna signifying that the contents of the can have been caught without harming dolphins . |
| 6 | As England 's leading batsman of the 1980s he has borne a heavy responsibility and perhaps because of this has never completely fulfilled his potential ; few batsmen can have been blessed with so much natural ability , yet he often looks vulnerable until he has settled down and even then has succumbed countless times to an infuriating nibble or waft outside the off stump . |
| 7 | There can be little doubt that at the time Constantine took control of the Western empire , Christianity can have been the religion of only a minority , though perhaps not so tiny a minority as has sometimes been thought . |
| 8 | The most admired new design was Chris Benedict 's 405 , so few can have been surprised that it was one of the RYA 's two finalists . |
| 9 | In February 1973 , when I first decided to make the journey , there can have been few twenty-eight year olds who were less fit for the task . |
| 10 | It is easy now to regard this wonder at an enemy 's humanity as naïve , but as it is the business of war to foster the naïveté on which it thrives , so there can have been few people in England during the isolation years of 1940–42 who did not take the impersonal nature of their enemy for granted . |
| 11 | Thus , execution in rem can have been available only where the person sued was actually in possession of the object . |
| 12 | Few sites can have been as intensively studied as this one , and indeed few sites are as amenable to exhaustive study as is a domestic garden . |
| 13 | The result in viewers ' minds can have been little other than confusion and fear , instead of the excitement that there should have been . |
| 14 | Few , however , can have been as tragic as the case of the midwife toad ( Alytes obstetricians ) and its reverberations in the 1920s . |
| 15 | There can have been few more painful moments in Melvyn Bragg 's professional life than when he sat in the audience of a public performance where Barry Humphries , in the guise of Edna Everage , asked if anyone had read any of Bragg 's novels and nobody raised their hand . |
| 16 | By the tenth century , few South Saxons can have been more than twenty miles from a market place , but these were rarely ‘ towns ’ in any later sense , or even comparable with their Roman predecessors ; Saxon society remained essentially rural , except in its very greatest centres . |
| 17 | Conditions for a Sussex ‘ miner , , or factor carbonis , can have been little different from that of later centuries , a nomadic life lived in the woods , shelter in bad weather being provided by the simple turf-covered pole shelters that were still in use forty years ago . |
| 18 | It is easy at this distance in time to explain the pattern away as an inevitable feature of the wider transition from one form of economy to another , but there can have been little pleasure for families like the Eldridges or Mepkins of Battle whose members appeared regularly in the poor-relief accounts over several generations . |
| 19 | It was Rush 's 287th goal in a record-breaking career and few can have been better , cancelling out Niall Quinn 's opener and leaving this fixture locked in stalemate for the third successive season . |
| 20 | It can have been no easy journey for the funeral procession of mourners and military volunteers as they followed the coffin up the steep climb to Catherine Hill Burial Ground that bleak Friday in February with the snow thick on the ground . |
| 21 | Any thoughtful linguist must wonder from time to time if such a legacy can have been shaken off completely in the relatively short time during which scientific linguistics has existed . |
| 22 | In his famous concluding paragraph of The Origin of Species Darwin expressed wonder that the diversity of the organic world can have been produced from one or a few ancestors by the operation of several natural laws — ‘ there is grandeur in this view of life … ’ . |
| 23 | The one or two well-to-do tanners identified in the subsidy rolls were so scattered , and formed so small a part of the population , that the contribution of leather working to the local economy can have been no more than marginal at best . |
| 24 | So widely dispersed was industrial activity that there can have been few parts of the country that did not support it in one form or another . |
| 25 | And if , on occasion , they pillaged or , like the following of Eudes of Burgundy , held up caravans of pilgrims and merchants to make a quick profit from their ransoms , few can have been surprised ; for it was adventure , self-interest , and companionship that bound knights to their lords . |
| 26 | Story-tellers have revitalised the tradition of verbal gossip to the point where a juicy item that happened late one night in Annabel 's for instance , can have been chattered right around the world in a matter of 24 hours without it ever going into the newspapers . |
| 27 | The row was signalled at the beginning of the year , and when the commissioner went public , it can have been no surprise , whatever ministers said . ’ |
| 28 | " Why do you think it can have been ? |
| 29 | According to Rosenblatt 's theory , the poem is like the noise the crash makes , and if there was no one to hear the crash — no ear drums for the waves to bang against — there can have been no noise . |
| 30 | In law and in logic no damage can have been caused to the plaintiff before the plaintiff existed . |