New answers tagged ellipsis
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votes
Is the use of a semicolon in the sentence 'The south sided with the King; the north with the usurper.' correct?
The convention is that only clauses which are independent can be separated by a semicolon. Your second clause is not independent and therefore should be separated from the first with a comma.
Your ...
- 2,784
4
votes
What grammar construction is preventing the highlighted section from committing a "run on sentence" error?
His mother died during his sophomore year, his father __ when he was a
senior.
This is called a 'gapped coordination construction', i.e. one where the middle part of a non-initial coordinate can be ...
- 12.2k
2
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How common is ellipting '(that/which has) to do'?
It's difficult to rule out a plethora of false positives in a Google ngram analysis.
A raw Google search for "Book to do with" - "book having to do with" (note that this is an ...
- 80.5k
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Is this awkward reuse of a verb between subjects correct?
Or maybe that "tended to ____" behaves like a single compound verb, and the tended part cannot be reused?
No, there's no grammatical rule of that nature here preventing reuse of tend. This ...
- 18.9k
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Is this awkward reuse of a verb between subjects correct?
The only problem with
Patients tended to perform for the camera and doctors [tended] to record the
most photogenic [patients].
is that it lacks a “comma of clarity” as shown in
Alice cooked the ...
- 15.3k
2
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Is this awkward reuse of a verb between subjects correct?
There's nothing incorrect about the sentence; to me it sounds at most mildly awkward. Indeed, in their discussion of gapping, Huddleston & Pullum (2002) give this example (p. 1338):
Kim was ...
- 15.7k
1
vote
...can you say that you won’t and haven’t sold Pegasus to [ellipsis]
The usual sequence is have not and will not [infinitive verb], rather than won't and haven't [past tense verb]. It's not usually contracted either, since this construction is usually used emphatically,...
- 140k
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...can you say that you won’t and haven’t sold Pegasus to [ellipsis]
No. A deletion must involve a word that appears elsewhere in the same form.
They didn't sell and won't sell Pegasus to a country that is known to violate human rights
-→
They didn't and won't sell ...
- 80.5k
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