I have written two groups of similar sentences below, but I don’t know in each group which sentence is the most natural way of implying the matter in my question. I was wondering if someone could help me:
A)
– 1) It’s one year now that you promised me.
– 2) It’s a year now that you promised me.
– 3) It’s one year now since you promised me.
– 4) It’s a year now since you promised me.
– 5) It has been one year now since you promised me.
– 6) It has been a year now since you promised me.
B)
– 1) One year ago today you promised me.
– 2) A year ago today you promised me.
– 3) One year ago at this you promised me.
– 4) A year ago at this you promised me.
Best Answer
My choice for "most natural-sounding option" is A-6, with the additional modification that "It has" would be contracted to "It's":
This formulation focuses more on the passage of time; we are emphasizing that a long time has come and gone since the promise was issued. (It does not need to be exactly one year, you could reasonably say it any time from 11 1/2 months to 18 months after the date the promise was issued, although some people might nitpick at your accuracy.)
The first 4 options in set A ("it is a/one year now that/since you promised me") all use the present tense, which cannot work when speaking of something that happened in the past; option 5's use of "one" instead of "a" breaks the natural stress that should fall on "year".
Set B's choices emphasize our arrival at the anniversary date of the promise, which to me seems less likely to be the thing that we want to emphasize; within that set, however, option 2 is clearly the best choice, because using "a" instead of "one" lets the stress fall naturally on the word "year", where it belongs; and because options 3 and 4 have no referent for the pronoun "this", making them improper.