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This following sentence is puzzling me. Neither can I understand the meaning, nor can I reason the grammatical soundness of the sentence.

Some symbols acquire a multitude of meanings, some widely shared, others personal, some contradictory, conflicted, or ambivalent.

Please help understand the meaning and grammatical explanation.

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  • 1
    How about, "Some symbols acquire a multitude of meanings, some of these meanings are widely shared, others are personal, some are contradictory, conflicted, or ambivalent."
    – Jim
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 18:26
  • @Jim, your sentence is easy to understand. I still wonder how the sentence I wrote can be correct.
    – Deepan Das
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 18:37
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    We are dealing here with participle clauses. Some symbols acquire a multitude of meanings, some widely being shared, others being personal, some *being contradictory, conflicted, or ambivalent.
    – JayHook
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 19:12
  • Some symbols acquire a multitude of meanings, **as** some of these meanings are widely shared, others are personal, some are contradictory, conflicted, or ambivalent. The sentence in question can be rephrased using adverbial clauses.
    – JayHook
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 19:14
  • All those highlighted phrases are modifiers of "meanings".
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Feb 2, 2018 at 4:09

2 Answers 2

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The implicit verb is simply “be”:

Some symbols acquire a multitude of meanings,
some [of which] [are] widely shared [meanings],
others [of which] [are] personal [meanings],
[and] some [of which] [are] contradictory, conflicted, or ambivalent [meanings].

This is a common structure to describe different parts of a subject with different adjectives, while avoiding repetition of the subject or verb. For example:

I bought four apples: two red, two green.

All of these are equivalent:

  • I bought four apples: two apples [were] red, two apples [were] green.
  • I bought four apples: two red ones, two green ones.
  • I bought four apples: two red apples and two green apples.
  • I bought four apples. Two of them were red and two of them were green.

Similar yet unrelated to this structure, some adjectives are postpositive, that is, they come after the noun they modify. Examples include: “the best hotel possible”, “the person responsible”, “the town proper”, “the attorney general”. This also appears in poetic language, like “the sky blue and forest green”, or “he called for his fiddlers three”.

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  • I'm not sure "[of which are]" is the right expansion; something like "I'm buying four books, two of them new" is fine, while *"I'm buying four books, two of them of which are new" is not.
    – ruakh
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 20:42
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    @ruakh: Of course, you’re taking my first example too literally. I only added the “of which” because there was nothing like “of them” as there is in your example. It’s “I’m buying four books, two of them new [books]”.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 21:04
  • Have you actually added the 'last case'?
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jan 31, 2018 at 12:07
  • @EdwinAshworth: I meant for the last paragraph to describe postpositive adjectives like “best possible” (or poetic “the river blue”) as “the last case (that I’m going to mention)” where this structure shows up. I could reword somehow if it’d be clearer.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 8:06
  • "last case' doesn't tie in at all well with the rest of the answer.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Feb 1, 2018 at 15:54
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There is no verb missing in this sentence. The sentence is somewhat unorthodox, in that the entire fragment in boldface is a series of modifiers of "a multitude of meanings." In this case, they are identifying the different components of the multitude:

  • widely shared meanings
  • personal meanings
  • contradictory meanings
  • conflicted meanings
  • ambivalent meanings

I think clarity arises if you punctuate the sentence somewhat differently:

Some symbols acquire a multitude of meanings: some widely shared, others personal; some contradictory, conflicted, or ambivalent.

However, either form is possible.

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