Example sentences of "can [not/n't] [verb] [prep] be " in BNC.

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No Sentence
1 To say that the patient can not demand to be stabbed because he can not suspend the operation of the criminal law and absolve the other of liability begs the question , depending as it does on a determination of what the criminal law is .
2 but we can not demand to be desired , for desire operates in complex , often unconscious ways .
3 People expect risks they did not ask for and can not control to be much lower -by 10 or 100 times — than those which they run willingly .
4 Red , oedematous swelling ; burning and stinging pains ; face puffed and pitted ; swollen eyelids ; can not bear to be left alone ; very sensitive to touch or pressure ; sweat comes and goes .
5 Intense pains , neuralgic pains , can not bear to be touched , in agony ; worse ( < ) night and especially in the evening .
6 And Michael Palin can not bear to be scrutinised .
7 They have satisfied all physical desire , but still can not bear to be parted .
8 The Government can not pretend to be concerned with security at army barracks and then , without regard for the soldiers , put them on the streets of London as easy targets for the terrorists . ’
9 The Government can not pretend to be concerned with security at army barracks and then , without regard for the soldiers , put them on the streets of London as easy targets for the terrorists . ’
10 But Scotland , with an economic base now concentrated on light rather than heavy industry , and services and decision-making centres far away from Edinburgh and Glasgow , can not hope to be spared the effects of recession .
11 It can not hope to be complete , but with luck Bromberg will even now be working on a detailed history of the TFTR experiment .
12 The aim of this small investigation , which can not hope to be truly scientific , is to investigate the extent of the problem and to see if there are any obvious patterns .
13 None of these difficulties are likely to trouble us much in daily life , but they remain genuine difficulties none the less and raise issues of fundamental importance ; for if there can be no absolutely reliable and unequivocal criteria for deciding whether any given existent remains numerically , and not merely qualitatively , the same from one moment in time to the next , then we can not hope to be able to " define " the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity in terms of the criteria of particular-identification .
14 Over a twelve-month period a field-worker 's persistent inquisitiveness is bound to become something of an irritant , and van Maanen notes how field-workers can not expect to be liked by all respondents ( 1982 : 111 ) .
15 For I can not expect to be offered help , nobody else will care to take a turn at the heavy work of pushing .
16 Mr Crosby said : ‘ I also have 10 important League matches left and have said all along that if we do n't win these as well I can not expect to be given the job here . ’
17 If a surveyor does his work badly it goes without saying that he can not expect to be paid for it , but usually the client will also wish to claim damages as financial compensation .
18 Teenagers who consistently fail to let parents know when they will be home , or where they are likely to be , can not expect to be allowed to stay out to all hours .
19 You can not expect to be asked the questions exactly as they appear here and you will be badly thrown if you have programmed yourself with exact responses to very particular questions which do not crop up in the way you had anticipated .
20 Believe in God for wrong reasons or for no reason at all and you can not expect to be free from doubt .
21 Indeed , you can not expect to be paid a great deal , but on the credit side you have no overheads and you will find the practice valuable , both in reading the pattern and using the machine .
22 You can not expect to be taken seriously with a bovine 's milking tackle perched on your bonce .
23 ‘ You can not expect to be in the national squad unless you can prove that you are good enough , so I just have to continue the learning process , equip myself fully for the task , get a bit fitter and that , hopefully , will be at least half the battle ’ .
24 The therapist can not expect to be able to do it easily and accurately straightaway or every time .
25 Since young managers can not expect to be rewarded for good short-term performances , there is less incentive to work for short-term results at the expense of longer-term benefits .
26 By the textuality of history , I mean to suggest , firstly , that we can have no access to a full and authentic past , a lived material existence , unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question — traces whose survival we can not assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement ; and secondly , that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the ‘ documents ’ upon which historians ground their own texts , called histories .
27 Unless a player is totally without imagination , then he can not fail to be aware of what has gone before as he makes his pilgrimage round Augusta .
28 MONDAY : On to the tiny island of Nisyros , you can not fail to be impressed by the image of perfectly white houses , dense greenery and volcanic soil .
29 Anyone looking at the photographs of the lift — and there are quite a lot — can not fail to be impressed by the engineering work , all the more striking because of its completely rural setting .
30 But I think he is simple-minded ’ — can not fail to be full of good things .
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