Hi,
Do these sentences mean the same? If they do, then which one do you prefer?
“He lay on his back and looked up at the sky.”
“He laid on his back and looked up at the sky.”
Thank you.
Only the first is possible. Read this: english-test.net/forum/ftopi … _lain_laid
I’d say
- He was laying on his back looking towards the sky. (lie, lay, lain)
- He was laid on his back so as to look towards the sky.(lay, laid, laid), (was laid ~ the passive voice)
Wrong or acceptable?
Thanks
1-- Wrong. The present participle is ‘lying’.
2-- Wrong unless he is dead and has been laid on his back by the murderer or the coroner.
Yeah, “lying”. I am always making that mistake typing “laying” instead of “lying”. I can’t control my fingers properly.
In addition, I didn’t care about the literally meaning of the second sentence much. Of course that the sentence changes its meaning if I change the main verb.
More examples on using the verbs “lay” and “lie”. They are very hard to distinguish because some forms of these two interweave. Please let me know about the mistakes in the sentences below.
Does London lie on Thames river?
I lay in my bed yesterday.
Titanic has lain at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean for decades.
It was lying under my bed and near the wall when I found it.
He had lain on the ground for two hours with a broken leg before they took him into hospital.
A chicken lay her legs regularly in this part of year.
She laid the frying pan onto the electric burner telling me that the omelette would be ready in a minute.
Have you laid the book on the shelf?
Thanks
Neither the literal meaning nor the grammatical sense of your second sentence was correct, yet you state ‘you don’t care about it much’.
I’m surprised. I thought you were keen to get everything right and that is why you spend so much time querying the efforts of other learners.
My only intention was to get used to two verbs that interweave by some way.
If the matter is hard to me I can’t take care about every thing related to the matter.
I focused on the recognition of the two verbs “lie” and “lay”.
Who knows, one day I might use those two verbs easily when speaking.
Today they are hard to me even when I am writing and auto-correcting.
You focused on the two verbs ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ and got one wrong. Your usage in sentence 2 was incorrect.
He was laying on his back looking towards the sky.
He was laying on his back so as to look towards the sky.
The person put themselves into that position.
The baby was laid on his back looking towards the sky.
The baby was laid on his back so as to look towards the sky.
Someone else put the baby into that position.
Thank you Mr. Micawber, Thank you Mrs. Beeesneees.
Can we remove the pronoun “his” and simply say “He lay on [color=gray] his [color=orange]the(?) back and looked up at the sky.” or doing the same to “on” as well, and say “He lay [color=gray] on his back and looked up at the sky.”? (considering the fact that you can not lay on others’ back! or can you?)
No, you cannot omit those words and keep the meaning.
With ‘lay back’, ‘back’ becomes an adverb of direction,so he could be sitting in a lawn chair.
It’s getting hard! 
But I got it. Thank you.