# Everyone <climbing> the mountain in 2 days received a prize



## Kawagucchan

Hi! I learned in this forum that things which are expressed by the reduced ing-clause cannot be interpreted as perfective.

■ Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize.  

If so, this sentence cannot mean that everyone who climbed the mountain received a prize.
It might be more plausible to say that everyone who was climbing the mountain: the accomplishment is not guaranteed.
"In 2 days" does imply the accomplishment of their climb, resulting in the ungrammaticality of the sentence.

Do you agree?


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## elroy

Kawagucchan said:


> Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize.


 This sentence makes no sense to me.


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## billj

[1]_ Everyone who climbed the mountain in 2 days received a prize. _
[2]_ Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize._

I'd say that aspectuality is neutralised in [2], and that [1] and [2] are semantically similar, the underlined clause in [1] being a relative one, in [2] a gerund-participial one.

Note, though, that we are talking here of the semantic category of aspectuality, not the syntactic category of aspect: *_Everyone who was climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize _makes little sense and is probably ungrammatical_._


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## se16teddy

Kawagucchan said:


> ■ Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize.


I don't think any native speaker hearing this sentence in isolation would suppose that they got the prize* before *they finished climbing the mountain.
Incidentally, the sentence sounds normal to me, and not ungrammatical. Some careful writers may try to mark -ing phrases for time sometimes, but *I never *say_ Everyone having climbed_... You might find that form in a legal document, but hardly anywhere else.


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## DonnyB

se16teddy said:


> I don't think any native speaker hearing this sentence in isolation would suppose that they got the prize* before *they finished climbing the mountain.
> Incidentally, the sentence sounds normal to me, and not ungrammatical. Some careful writers may try to mark -ing phrases for time sometimes, but *I never *say_ Everyone having climbed_... You might find that form in a legal document, but hardly anywhere else.



Yes, to me, the only logical interpretation of that sentence is that everyone who achieved the feat of climbing the mountain in as little as only two days, got a prize for it.  Otherwise, what was the prize awarded for?


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## elroy

se16teddy said:


> Incidentally, the sentence sounds normal to me, and not ungrammatical.


 To me it sounds very strange because it's in the past.

Everyone climbing the mountain in two days *will receive* a prize. --  This sounds fine.
Everyone climbing the mountain in two days _*received*_ a prize. --  This sounds off.


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## Uncle Jack

For what it's worth, I think it is fine. "Received" makes it clear that it refers to the past, so "who climbed" conveys no additional information that is lost by using "climbing". I can easily imagine a newspaper report describing, for example, a race that was run up Conwy Mountain in North Wales (244 m above mean seal level), where competitors were blindfolded and had their feet tied together*. Survivors were all given a certificate signed by the Prince of Wales, and anyone climbing the mountain in two days received a prize.

I wonder if elroy interprets "in two days" as meaning "in two days' time", in other words the day after tomorrow, rather than within a time period of two days.

*Britain is rather short of mountains that take two days to climb if you don't have your legs tied together and you can see where you are going.


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## cidertree

elroy said:


> To me it sounds very strange because it's in the past.
> ...
> Everyone climbing the mountain in two days _*received*_ a prize. --  This sounds off.


I'm not so sure. 
_Everyone climbing the mountain in two days receives a prize_ sounds fine. Transposing it to the past doesn't seem odd to me.


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## elroy

Uncle Jack said:


> "Received" makes it clear that it refers to the past, so "who climbed" conveys no additional information that is lost by using "climbing".


 Sure, but that's not the way English works.   In "I'm eating an apple yesterday," "yesterday" makes it clear we're referring to the past, but the tense is still wrong.


Uncle Jack said:


> I wonder if elroy interprets "in two days" as meaning "in two days' time", in other words the day after tomorrow, rather than within a time period of two days.


 No, I interpreted it as "within two days." 

It still sounds off to me.  I don't know if it's a US/UK thing, or just me. 🤷🏻‍♂️


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## Kawagucchan

Thank youuu～
Ummm they might have climbed Mt Eiger, though the name of the mountain wasn't clearly mentioned.

Of course, from our knowledge of the world, it is natural to assume that they reached the top of the mountain before they received a prize.
The original sentence lacks "in 2days," and the writer said that the sentence was ambiguous to 2ways, "who 
climbed" and "who was climbing." I think that the writer might have wanted to say that this ambiguity was theoretically available.
If this kind of relative ing clauses do not imply the accomplishment of actions, the original sentence with "in 2 days", which entails 
accomplishment, makes little sense.

If this sentence is interpretable as "who was climbing the mountain," it follows that they couldn't reach the top. 
In this reading, the government (?) judged their challenge to be worth a prize.

The most natural reading is , of course, they managed to reach the top in 2 days and then received a prize.
("They were reaching the top in  2days" seems incoherent to me)


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## Kawagucchan

In fact, a certain book insists that the reduced -ing clause cannot entail the achievement.
On the other  hand, the writer of this sentence regards this sentence to be ambiguous, allowing one to 
find the reading "who climbed the mountain"


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## MagEditor

elroy said:


> It still sounds off to me.  I don't know if it's a US/UK thing, or just me. 🤷🏻‍♂️


Elroy,

From a fellow Yank, see if this makes some kind of sense:

"Everyone arriving at the meeting before 7 a.m. gets a free cup of coffee."

I take the original sentence to mean something similar: Everyone who climbs the mountain within 2 days receives a prize. (Hat tip to DonnyB.)

Does that work for you, or does it still sound off?


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## Kawagucchan

[


MagEditor said:


> "Everyone arriving at the meeting before 7 a.m. gets a free cup of coffee."



Referring to this sentence might be regarded as a drift, but I think that adding commas will make the sentence better.
Similarly, "everyone, climbing the mountain in 2 days,.." might have been easier to understand. That asserts they did reach the top.


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## grassy

Kawagucchan said:


> Similarly, "everyone, climbing the mountain in 2 days,.." might have been easier to understand. That asserts they did reach the top.


I don't think it does. In fact, I think it makes the sentence even worse!


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## MagEditor

grassy said:


> I don't think it does. In fact, I think it makes the sentence even worse!


Right, because it sounds like the speaker is addressing everyone. 

("Everyone, I'd like you to meet our newest employee.")


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## DonnyB

Kawagucchan said:


> ....
> The original sentence lacks "in 2days," and the writer said that the sentence was ambiguous to 2ways, "who
> climbed" and "who was climbing." I think that the writer might have wanted to say that this ambiguity was theoretically available.
> If this kind of relative ing clauses do not imply the accomplishment of actions, the original sentence with "in 2 days", which entails
> accomplishment, makes little sense.
> 
> If this sentence is interpretable as "who was climbing the mountain," it follows that they couldn't reach the top.
> In this reading, the government (?) judged their challenge to be worth a prize.
> 
> The most natural reading is , of course, they managed to reach the top in 2 days and then received a prize.
> ("They were reaching the top in  2days" seems incoherent to me)


If you remove the "in two days", leaving the sentence as " Everyone climbing the mountain received a prize." then you significantly alter the inference, because (to me, at least) that suggests that everyone undertaking the climb received a prize irrespective of whether they eventually reached the top or not, let alone whether they did it in two days.  It rather then begs the question of what the prize was _for, _but we're not told that in the sentence as it now stands. 

I'm afraid I feel bound to point out that this whole exercise seems to me to be a classic illustration of the dangers inherent in trying to analyse the meaning of contextless sentences.


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## elroy

MagEditor said:


> "Everyone arriving at the meeting before 7 a.m. gets a free cup of coffee."


 This one is fine because it’s in the present tense.

“Everyone arriving at the meeting before 7 a.m. *got* a free cup of coffee” doesn’t sound right to me.

Does it work for you?


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## DonnyB

elroy said:


> This one is fine because it’s in the present tense.
> 
> “Everyone arriving at the meeting before 7 a.m. *got* a free cup of coffee” doesn’t sound right to me.
> 
> Does it work for you?


That sounds fine to me, yes.   

I would take it to be referring to a meeting, or a series of meetings, which took place in the past.  So it equates to saying that if they arrived before 7am they got a free cup of coffee.


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## billj

Kawagucchan said:


> In fact, a certain book insists that the reduced -ing clause cannot entail the achievement. On the other  hand, the writer of this sentence regards this sentence to be ambiguous, allowing one to find the reading "who climbed the mountain"


[1]_ Everyone who climbed the mountain in 2 days received a prize._
[2]_ Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize._

[2] is interpreted with progressive aspectuality, but syntactically it is not the progressive aspect since it lacks the verb "be" If it were reformulated as  *_Everyone who was climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize it_ would make little sense and probably be ungrammatical_._

The gerund-participial clause is non-finite, i.e. tenseless, so it can be used in clauses expressing past, present or future time: there's no reason to say that [2] is any less grammatical than [3].

[3]_ Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days will receive a prize._

I can't see anything wrong with [2]. I'd say it's semantically similar to [1], the only real difference between the two being the clause type.


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## MagEditor

elroy said:


> This one is fine because it’s in the present tense.
> 
> “Everyone arriving at the meeting before 7 a.m. *got* a free cup of coffee” doesn’t sound right to me.
> 
> Does it work for you?


Both versions work for me -- mine and yours.

Yours needs no explanation. As for mine, I was envisioning something that could run in a local newspaper, which would explain the use of present tense.

In other words: "Attention, residents of Gotham City, our monthly city council meeting wiill begin at 7 a.m. Thursday, and everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *gets *a free cup of coffee."

Might be clearer to say "anyone *who arrives *before 7 a.m.," but of course, we're playing off the original.

How does that strike you?


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## elroy

MagEditor said:


> "Attention, residents of Gotham City, our monthly city council meeting wiill begin at 7 a.m. Thursday, and everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *gets *a free cup of coffee."
> 
> How does that strike you?


 As I said, that works fine for me because it's in the present tense. 

If the paper were reporting on the event after it happened, I would find "everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *got* a free cup of coffee" strange.  I would expect and use "everyone *who arrived*..." in that context. 

Does that help clarify my judgments?  As I suggested above, it could just be me.


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## MagEditor

Ah, yes ... point taken. 

I noticed the difference in my example (present tense) and the original (past tense) moments after I posted a reply. So I'll post another reply!

I agree that it sounds clunky to say "everyone arriving before 7 a.m. got a free cup of coffee," and it's certainly not how I'd write it. As you noted, "everyone who arrived" would be best.

But I'm still wrestling with the notion that technically, it's not grammatically wrong to say "arriving ... got" (or "climbing ... received").  

By all means, feel free to prove me wrong.


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## Kawagucchan

everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *gets *a free cup of coffee. 

I think that the employment of the present tense in the MAIN clause seems exceptional.
For convenience sake, I would like to conveniently premise that -ing clauses cannot assert the achievement.
In this sentence, the present tense implies iterative, habitual actions: arriving and getting a free cup of coffee habitually take place. These events are not achieved and perfected. Rather, they took place, take place and will take place habitually.
The same analysis might be able to be applied to the sentence in question. If so, the sentence can only be taken as "was climbing" 

Everyone climbing the mountain receives the prize.

This patter might be interpreted as "if everyone climbs the mountain," thereby referring to some a law of some country.
What is problematic in the original sentence is , as everyone says, the presence of the past tense "received."
Since the time present in the tenseless, non-finite "climbing" must correspond to the time of "received", we have to interpret "climbing" as "was climbing" or "climbed" , not "will climb" or "is climbing" etc.


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## Kawagucchan

Everyone climbing the mountain in 2days received the prize.

Unless the sentence is taken as "everyone who climbed the mountain," the sentence does not make sense in the light of knowledge of the world.
Some of the native speakers who encounters the sentence would perhaps find some interpretation which wouldn't go against our knowledge of the world: ie "who climbed the world"

But  if we do not take knowledge of the world into account and we purely face to this sentence, I wondered what interpretation we could find


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## DonnyB

Kawagucchan said:


> everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *gets *a free cup of coffee.
> 
> I think that the employment of the present tense in the MAIN clause seems exceptional.
> For convenience sake, I would like to conveniently premise that -ing clauses cannot assert the achievement.
> In this sentence, the present tense implies iterative, habitual actions: arriving and getting a free cup of coffee habitually take place. These events are not achieved and perfected. Rather, they took place, take place and will take place habitually.
> The same analysis might be able to be applied to the sentence in question. If so, the sentence can only be taken as "was climbing"
> 
> Everyone climbing the mountain receives the prize.
> 
> This patter might be interpreted as "if everyone climbs the mountain," thereby referring to some a law of some country.
> What is problematic in the original sentence is , as everyone says, the presence of the past tense "received."
> Since the time present in the tenseless, non-finite "climbing" must correspond to the time of "received", we have to interpret "climbing" as "was climbing" or "climbed" , not "will climb" or "is climbing" etc.


I'm sorry, but I think you're trying to over-analyse this and formulate some sort of rule where there isn't one.  Native speakers will look at the surrounding context and deduce from that how the clauses relate to each other and arrive at the meaning.
"Everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *gets *a free cup of coffee." clearly refers to a _current_ situation: if you arrive to whatever-it-is, before 7am, you get a free cup of coffee: that's the deal.
"Everyone arriving before 7 a.m. *got *a free cup of coffee." is the same 'deal' but referring to a _past_ scenario.  Maybe the offer's been withdrawn or the meetings are no longer being held.

You can't tell from either of those examples as they stand, whether the offer was a one off which only applied to a meeting or event held on a particular day, or whether it was a regular offer which applied every time the meeting is/was held.  In real life it would be obvious, because the sentence wouldn't exist in a vacuum, it would apply to a a specific offer which was open to everyone going: the free cup of coffee was contingent on you getting there before 7am.


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## Kawagucchan

Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize. 

As for the original sentence, what conclusion can I draw?

・grammatical but makes little sense
・perfectly understandable


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## billj

Kawagucchan said:


> Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize.
> 
> As for the original sentence, what conclusion can I draw?
> 
> ・grammatical but makes little sense
> ・perfectly understandable


It's both grammatical and understandable.


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## Kawagucchan

Elroy said the sentence was odd.
Elroy is a speaker of US English, and the grammarian who introduces the sentence is also American. 
Another linguist who describes this kind of ing as imperfective (ie. the completion of the event is not guaranteed) is Patrick Duffley.
However, he seems to belong to a university in France, so I could not decide whether he was a native speaker of English or not.

If this could be interpretable as "everyone who was climbing...", this reading might be endemic to US English.


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## elroy

Kawagucchan said:


> Elroy said the sentence was odd.


 I am one person, and as I said it may just be me.  @MagEditor is also a US English speaker and his judgment is different from mine.  Don’t fall into the trap of confirmation bias!


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## billj

You have already been told that it is not to be interpreted that way.

It's certainly fine in BrE, and there's no reason to assume it's otherwise for American speakers.

I think you should leave it at that.


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## Uncle Jack

Elroy's concerns appear to be about using the present participle for an action in the past, and I think it is about grammar rather than meaning (but I could be mistaken).


Kawagucchan said:


> Another linguist who describes this kind of ing as imperfective (ie. the completion of the event is not guaranteed) is Patrick Duffley.


I wouldn't call it "the imperfective"; it is a present participle and does not distinguish between completed and ongoing actions. However, I agree that completion of the event is not guaranteed, and "everyone climbing" could mean "everyone who was climbing", "everyone who climbed", "everyone who had been climbing" or "everyone who had climbed".

This sort of ambiguity is very common in English sentences, and we make sense of the sentence by either fitting it into what we know of the context (here, none has been given) or we try to imagine a situation in which the sentence might be said. I have no difficulty whatsoever in imagining a situation. There was some sort of competition to climb the mountain, and competitors who got to the top (or, possibly, got to the top and returned to the bottom) within two days received a prize.

This does not mean that this is the meaning the speaker intended. Perhaps the speaker did mean people who spent two days climbing the mountain without necessarily getting to the top. However, this situation seems so much less likely than the one I imagined, that I discount it until presented with further information.

This is one reason why context is so important in English, and why we insist on asking for it. However, I should also say that a very important part of forming correct sentences in English is avoiding ambiguity. If the speaker was referring to people who spent two days on the mountain without getting to the top, they should have realised that their sentence would be misinterpreted and should have used a relative clause instead.


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## elroy

billj said:


> there's no reason to assume it is otherwise for American speakers.


 Uh, no.  Only two US English speakers have commented so far.  I find it odd, and @MagEditor doesn’t reject it but does say it sounds clunky to him.  So while it may be broadly acceptable in US English, there is a chance it’s not.

People need to read all the posts carefully!


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## billj

elroy said:


> Uh, no.  Only two US English speakers have commented so far.  I find it odd, and @MagEditor doesn’t reject it but does say it sounds clunky to him.  So while it may be broadly acceptable in US English, there is a chance it’s not.


I don't think there's  anything "clunky" about it at all.

The soundest advice we can give the OP is that it is not ungrammatical (see #19), and that there's no reason to assume that is unacceptable to most speakers of either BrE or AmE.


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## elroy

billj said:


> I don't see anything "clunky" about it at all.


 Yes, you've made _your_ opinion and judgment eminently clear. 


billj said:


> The soundest advice we can give the OP is that it is not ungrammatical, and that there's no reason to assume that is unacceptable to most speakers of either BrE or AmE.


 No, that would be very biased advice.  All I can (tentatively) gather from the responses in this thread is that it seems to be broadly acceptable in British English and that the jury is still out as far as American English.


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## billj

elroy said:


> Yes, you've made _your_ opinion and judgment eminently clear.
> No, that would be very biased advice.  All I can (tentatively) gather from the responses in this thread is that it seems to be broadly acceptable in British English and that the jury is still out as far as American English.


It's not biased; as a grammarian I always try to give unbiased advice. I can find nothing in any grammar that claims it is unacceptable to some speakers.

What grammatical reasons to you have for claiming it is not acceptable?


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## billj

Uncle Jack said:


> Elroy's concerns appear to be about using the present participle for an action in the past, and I think it is about grammar rather than meaning (but I could be mistaken).
> 
> I wouldn't call it "the imperfective"; it is a present participle and does not distinguish between completed and ongoing actions. However, I agree that completion of the event is not guaranteed, and "everyone climbing" could mean "everyone who was climbing", "everyone who climbed", "everyone who had been climbing" or "everyone who had climbed".
> 
> This sort of ambiguity is very common in English sentences, and we make sense of the sentence by either fitting it into what we know of the context (here, none has been given) or we try to imagine a situation in which the sentence might be said. I have no difficulty whatsoever in imagining a situation. There was some sort of competition to climb the mountain, and competitors who got to the top (or, possibly, got to the top and returned to the bottom) within two days received a prize.
> 
> This does not mean that this is the meaning the speaker intended. Perhaps the speaker did mean people who spent two days climbing the mountain without necessarily getting to the top. However, this situation seems so much less likely than the one I imagined, that I discount it until presented with further information.
> 
> This is one reason why context is so important in English, and why we insist on asking for it. However, I should also say that a very important part of forming correct sentences in English is avoiding ambiguity. If the speaker was referring to people who spent two days on the mountain without getting to the top, they should have realised that their sentence would be misinterpreted and should have used a relative clause instead.


I agree in principal with what you say about the imperfective vs perfective contrast.


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## elroy

Uncle Jack said:


> Perhaps the speaker did mean people who spent two days climbing the mountain without necessarily getting to the top.


 Don't you think this reading is ruled out by the preposition "in"?

Do you think "I climbed the mountain in two days" can mean "I spent two days climbing the mountain but didn't necessarily get to the top"?


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## Uncle Jack

elroy said:


> Don't you think this reading is ruled out by the preposition "in"?


Made unlikely, certainly. I am not quite sure whether it is ruled out entirely. Too often on here we have been presented with a sentence which appears to have a clear meaning, and then some time later we are given the context and find it means something different.


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## velisarius

I agree with elroy in finding the sentence clunky to the point of being unacceptable. 
But I've noticed that others seem happy to use it. I most certainly wouldn't.


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## Kawagucchan

Since "climbing" in "everyone climbing" is non-finite and no concept of the tense is concerned with it, it might be reasonable to
say that "climbing" is neutral not only in its time (not tense) but also in its aspect (whether it is perfective or imperfective).
It is the possibility  which I came to realise while I was writing a paper. Today I referred to Declerck's grammar book, and he said in his book that
this kind of ing needed to be taken as progressie; HOWEVER, he mentioned some exceptions. How to interpret this kind of ing does not
seem decisive but seems fluid.


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## Kawagucchan

I got another possibility.
"Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days received a prize"
The sentence was regarded as plausible, but some of  you regarded it as odd.
But if the main verb had been "used to/would", the grammaticality would dramatically improved, I think.
(Everyone climbing the mountain in 2 days used to/would receive the prize)


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