A question from my GMAT class, which I was told is wrong and it was left for me to figure it out.
After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree to hang it from.
It sounds good when everyday conversation is considered, but what is wrong with it anyway? I tried to search but was bemused as to how to look for it.
After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree to hang IT from.
In the example above, IT cannot logically refer to fire, yet the sentence is ambiguous.
As long as both the nouns "deer" and "fire" can be followed by the pronoun IT since both make grammatical sense with it, what sounds like the simplest solution here is to repeat the noun "deer" to clear any ambiguity.
And so:
After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree to hang the deer from.
While the answers that explain the pronoun reference issue might explain why your teacher calls this sentence wrong, you should know that, in common use, it's not wrong. It's barely awkward.
People are smarter than stupid computer programs and grammar formalisms. We all know that you can't hang a fire from a tree. Furthermore, the deer is fronted -- highlighted as the primary subject by placement in the first position of the sentence. So, in the context of a narrative of a hunter camping out, any of us would read that sentence and understand it, without any need to stop and puzzle over the binding of 'it'.
Personally, on the other hand, I find 'to hang it from' to be a bit clunky. If I had to pull one smoother idea out of my head, I'd offer '... for a tree where he could hang it.'
Note that I didn't feel any need to replace 'it' with 'the roasted deer,' as per my point above.
Pronoun reference confusion has to be cleaned up when the competing nouns are more or less interchangeable, so that there is, in fact, the potential for confusion. This is the source of an endless supply of unintentionally humorous headlines in newspapers. But when there are two things that disambiguate (the non-hang-ability of fires and the fronting of the deer), there's no problem to solve.
The problem, from a text analysis point of view, is that the reference it points to the referent fire, because that is the last word that precedes it that can linguistically be referenced by it. If you want your reference to point to deer, you must either restructure your sentence so deer is the last possible referent before it (example 1), or you must change it to something that cannot reference fire, but only deer (example 2).
Examples:
In formal writing, one does not end a sentence with a preposition. The formally correct way to write this sentence is: After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree from which to hang it.
This is one of those hold-over rules from prescriptive grammarians of the 19th century that has little to do with actual modern usage - even in fairly formal settings. Winston Churchill is alleged to have responded to a complaint that he ended a sentence with the preposition saying that "That's one of those bits of nonsense up with which I shall not put".
If you dig enough, you can find an explanation for the rule - a similar rule against splitting infinitives comes from Latin, where infinitives are single words so can't be split! - but it really doesn't much matter.
"After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree to hang it from."
This is a compound sentenance with a shared subject (the hunter) and two "verb-object" constructs ( "extinguished the fire" and "searched for a tree"). The phrase "to hang it from" is adverbial, describing why he searched and the phrase "After roasting the deer" is adverbial, describing when he searched relitive to extinghishing the fire. Since a pronoun must refer to the grammatical object, it could only refer to the fire.
The subject of the sentenance is the hunter and the object is the fire. These are connected by the verb "extinguished"( SEE "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_(grammar)" ).
Well, just to be Devil's Advocate, I'd bet that if offered enough money, most people here could figure out how to hang a campfire from a tree.
Imagine the X Prize Foundation announcing this:
REWARD
$1,000,000
For Anyone Who Can
(Using Any Method)
Hang the Contents of an Extinguished Campfire
From a Tree
I'd do it pretty quickly!!
:D
(Never assume the hunter wasn't trying to do just that, cause you never know!)
There are two things at issue:
Alternatively:
"After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire. He then searched for a tree from which to hang the cooked carcass."
The actual problem is that you have ended your answer with a preposition. It should read, "a tree from which to hang it". This is an example of a common spoken grammatical error that "sounds right" to a lot of people who have learned it wrong. There are many other examples of common spoken English being incorrect, such as "me and Julie went to the store" or "myself and Julie went to the store". The correct grammar is "Julie and I went to the store." I even hear people say, "He gave the tickets to I and Julie" or "He gave the tickets to myself and Julie". It should be, "He gave the tickets to Julie and me." Unfortunately, many of us have parents whose grammar is poor, and they taught us to speak incorrectly.
More extreme examples are common in the African-American community, where grammatical errors are so common in their spoken language that a proposal to name their language "Ebonics" was circulated for awhile. So just because something "sounds right" does NOT make it correct!
