New answers tagged syntactic-analysis
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(Rather than) as a conjunction
John Lawler commented:
Yes. And here's where the multi-word character of rather than comes in handy; you can split them up and put rather in an adverbial position: I would rather tell her than she ...
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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 ...
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Is "There danced a man in the hall" a grammatical alternative to "A man danced in the hall"? What verbs are possible here?
The Once there [was/were] (in the past tense, traditionally used for storytelling) and There [is/are] (present tense, used to state that things exist) structures are pretty common and the use of There ...
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Is "There danced a man in the hall" a grammatical alternative to "A man danced in the hall"? What verbs are possible here?
The function of there in this kind of sentence is to introduce a new topic. Because of this, it is usually followed by a form of the verb to be, but looking at Google Ngrams, it's also often followed ...
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5
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Is "There danced a man in the hall" a grammatical alternative to "A man danced in the hall"? What verbs are possible here?
You are asking the wrong question. A sentence can be grammatically correct without being something that people would say in real life, or even without making sense.
There is nothing grammatically ...
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2
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Is "There danced a man in the hall" a grammatical alternative to "A man danced in the hall"? What verbs are possible here?
It sounds archaic. It's the same pattern as "there once lived a man..." but we don't really use this anymore, with the exception of "there was" or "there is."
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Accepted
'as he had lived'
He died [as he had lived].
As the Original Poster suspects, the string as he had lived is a Modifier of the verb phrase died. (It's a verb phrase as opposed to merely a verb because it forms the ...
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1
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Accepted
Feel confused about the use of "seem" or "seems" in these two sentences
TL;DR: In cases like yours, either version is correct; the plural form seem is what we would expect, but the singular seems is a common alternative. (My source for the following analysis is The ...
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2
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Accepted
What is the technical grammatical difference between these two sentences?
The difference between these two sentences is the same as the difference between:
I sent her a message.
I sent a message to her.
In (1), send is used as a ditransitive verb, with an indirect object (...
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Parsing "…including a problem…, in a characteristically diffident aside, he noted his own 'fleeting vain attempts' to resolve it"
The very last chunk should read
—including a problem that continues to vex them a century and a half after he had noted, in a characteristically diffident aside, his own “fleeting vain attempts” to ...
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2
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Parsing "…including a problem…, in a characteristically diffident aside, he noted his own 'fleeting vain attempts' to resolve it"
There is a sense, though, not to be left unremarked in a prologue, in which this book most properly belongs to Bernhard Riemann, who, in a short life
blighted with much misfortune, gave to his fellow ...
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2
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Parsing "…including a problem…, in a characteristically diffident aside, he noted his own 'fleeting vain attempts' to resolve it"
The parse is:
There is a sense, though, not to be left unremarked in a prologue, in
which this book most properly belongs to Bernhard Riemann, who [,
in a short life blighted with much misfortune,] ...
- 13.9k
3
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John goes to the cinema with Kate and (with) Ann
Perceptually, though not definitively…
All three go to the cinema together.
John only goes to the cinema with one girl each time.
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Is Wikipedia's example of parallelism incorrect?
To summarise the comments above (and applying parallelism to the first comment):
The Wikipedia page itself address this very issue: "The final phrase of the [dog] example does not include a ...
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What is the term for this?
I'm wondering what the term would be when someone mislabels a field of study (psychology in this case) as a person,
It isn't "mislabelling" at all. It is synecdoche (/sᵻˈnɛkdəki/).
OED ...
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