Timeline for Grammatical name/function of "what" in the following sentence
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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Jul 16, 2015 at 4:57 | answer | added | rogermue | timeline score: 0 | |
Apr 16, 2015 at 20:27 | history | edited | jvriesem | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added my best guess
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Apr 16, 2015 at 20:13 | history | edited | jvriesem | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 31 characters in body
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Apr 16, 2015 at 20:09 | answer | added | Greg Lee | timeline score: 1 | |
Apr 16, 2015 at 20:04 | comment | added | John Lawler | Well, it's an imperative, so it's missing a subject. And embedded question complements don't diagram well, I'm afraid. Sentence diagramming really only works for short sentences without subordinate clauses; the kind you see in first and second grade and never again after that, except in grammar class. | |
Apr 16, 2015 at 19:48 | comment | added | jvriesem | @John Lawler: Totally. It's an easy mistake to make! I'm still curious how the sentence would be diagrammed if it was "Simply describe what the data that you collected are." | |
Apr 16, 2015 at 19:47 | history | edited | jvriesem | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Gave context for the sentence.
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Apr 15, 2015 at 18:49 | comment | added | John Lawler | It looks like the author (this sentence was never spoken) started to make an embedded question complement of describe (Describe what you collected) and then decided to add the data that you collected, making it clearer what was what, and then forgot to delete the original what. That happens all the time when editing, as everybody here probly recognizes. | |
Apr 15, 2015 at 18:16 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | You're right, the sentence is ungrammatical. If you append are you end up with a fused relative clause what [they] are in which what plays the role of predicate complement. | |
Apr 15, 2015 at 18:13 | review | First posts | |||
Apr 15, 2015 at 18:43 | |||||
Apr 15, 2015 at 18:13 | history | asked | jvriesem | CC BY-SA 3.0 |