Thanks Gervais! I get taken aback sometimes and lose my confidence when encountering surprise sentences like this. You and Paul both gave what my gut was telling me, but I wanted to make sure! Thanks to both of you once again.

No native speaker of English says infelicitous stuff like that.

It is ambiguous and poorly constructed, so analysing it is pretty pointless really since one would just go round in circles searching for the intended meaning through a process of disambiguation.






PaulM

Thanks Paul! That's what I thought (my gut instinct), but wanted to get confirmation. I've been speaking Polish for so long I forget my English grammar!

Glad to help. For my part, your question was not about how 'natural' the language of the sentence is. I wanted to address your query:
"The original question came up after various simple past and present tense statements were presented and then the question, Where is John? "

...and what information about this could be derived from the tense of the verb forms.


Mr.Matthews and I have different approaches when it comes to tutoring in English.

What qualifications do you have that justify your using the term 'tutoring' to describe the approach that you take on this website?



PaulM