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But no one in Brega had a clear idea of what was happening on the battlefield, not even the few fighters fidgeting by a new barricade outside the refinery’s front gate

Source-: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/09/sons-of-the-revolution

Role of bold, italicized phrase in the above sentence?

I think it's an appositive-- noun phrase that clarifies or describes a noun-- for it's clarifying the subject of the clause "no one", emphasizing, using the adverb phrase "not even", that "not even noun phrase X".

I question the placing of the noun phrase at the end. Shouldn't it be next to the noun it describes or clarifies?

I wouldn't call it an absolute phrase because the noun phrase isn't modifying the entire sentence.

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  • When you say you "doubt", don’t you actually mean that you "question"? If so, then are you questioning whether it is grammatical as written, whether it is not in fact an appositive, or something else again?
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Dec 25, 2023 at 3:51
  • My bad, I did mean "question"
    – rahul sehrawat
    Commented Dec 25, 2023 at 3:53
  • FYI: The Online CMU English parser tool can help you figure out the linkages between different constituents in a sentence. The free version only allows short sentences, though, so for this case you'd have to trim it down a bit, like with But no one had a clear idea of what was happening, not even the fighters fidgeting by a new barricade. That one has lots of discarded possibilities that it rejected first. But no one, not even the fighters fidgeting by a new barricade, had a clear idea of what was happening has significantly fewer.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Dec 25, 2023 at 4:10

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It's an appositive. While an appositive is normally positioned next to the noun phrase to which it is anchored, it can be separated from it when the noun phrase is not at the end of a clause (Huddleston & Pullum (2002), pp. 1357-1358, though they would consider this an "ascriptive noun phrase supplement" rather than a true appositive).

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  • The part in italics doesn't stand in the same syntactic relation to the rest of the sentence and "the few fighters..." has a different referent than " no one in Brega", which would make it not an appositive per several definitions I'm familiar with. What are the essential features of an appositive in your view?
    – TimR
    Commented Dec 25, 2023 at 18:27
  • @TimR Yeah, that's why it's technically an ascriptive noun phrase rather than an appositive; it describes "no one in Brega," but can't replace it, since it's giving a description rather than an identification.
    – alphabet
    Commented Dec 25, 2023 at 18:35

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