why participle?

Hello

There are two important things we must do: we have to convene a meeting, the other being the retrieval of the lost animal. 

IMO, the blue part is a participle phrase, and not a gerund one.

My problem is:

I do not see the participle phrase being used in conformity to the rules of that subset of the English grammar I am familiar with.

There are two important things we must do: we have to convene a meeting, the other is the retrieval of the lost animal

However, my tin non-native ears are not bothered hearing either sentence.

Any suggestion is welcome.

thanks

Inchoateknowledge wrote:

Hello There are two important things we must do: we have to convene a meeting, the other being the retrieval of the lost animal.  IMO, the blue part is a participle phrase, and not a gerund one. My problem is: I do not see the participle phrase being used in conformity to the rules of that subset of the English grammar I am familiar with. There are two important things we must do: We have to convene a meeting, and the other is the retrieval of the lost animal.

There should be a conjunction "and" or something to connect your two sentences above, and the two subjects are different in the two sentences. Therefore, according to the rules of participial structures, when the two subjects are different, we must keep both of them when one of the sentence is transformed into a participial phrase, which is also called "absolute participial structure." Following are some additional examples:

1. It being fine, we went on a picnic.

2. His life threatened by secret police, the human-rights activist fled his country to seek political asylum in the United States.

3. The airport enveloped in a dense fog, the airliner with 218 passengers aboard circled the airport for half an hour.

Inchoateknowledge wrote:

Hello I saw this syntax in a dictionary. "The predicate is [a syntactic unit] (that functions as one of the two main constituents of a simple sentence), the other being the subject, and (that consists of a verb, which in English may agree with the subject in number,)" Even so, even if there is a conjunction, the sentence is still unbalanced. Thanks

Hi, Incho.

I presume you omitted something singnificant to the whole statement; and I get it back in order to have a clear and whole picture of your base sentence.

The conjunction "and" is used to connect two adjectival relative clauses that modify "a syntactic unit" here, so it's balanced.