Search results for 'tag:Definite articles tag:Sentence structures' matching tags 'Definite articles' and 'Sentence structures'

Re: Article - where do they go?

Clive — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:07:21 GMT

Hi,

Please look at this and tell me if the indefinite article 'a' goes with the third and fourth underlined parts. Is there possible confusion? If yes, how would you resolve it in term of grammar and the sentence structure? Would you say ther article 'a' does not go with any other words except the number one word?

Everything that goes into making a programme, lighting, staff and rent is now being reviewed.

The last three words appear to be used in a non-countable sense, so I would take the 'a' to relate only to 'programme'.

In addition, the verb 'make' does not seem to me to be a good choice for use with the other three nouns. We don't usually say, for example, that we 'make staff'.
I'd prefer to add other verbs, to clarify whatever is the intended meaning. eg

Everything that goes into making a programme, creating lighting, recruiting staff and paying for rent is now being reviewed.

Best wishes, Clive

Article - where do they go?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:26:46 GMT

Re: There is not more

Eimai_Anglos — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:27:10 GMT

1: There is no more interesting way.
2: There is no more an interesting way. [Eimai_Anglos]

2 was wrongly attributed to me. I did not type that and I would not recommend its usage, even if it's grammatically correct!

"There is no more interesting a way." - is correct.
Note the position of the indefinite article.

"There is a way"
"There is (no more interesting) a way."
"There is a more interesting way."

Notice the affect of "no" on the sentence structure!

Re: What's the logic behind this?

paco2004 — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:40:32 GMT

Hello MrP

So I can only assume that either Dickens got his idiom slightly wrong, or âChild as he wasâ had a simple complementary sense in his day.

I feel your sense that children are not immune to hunger and misery is very modern one. Children of poor social classes in Dickens' times would be put in misery and they were exposed to hunger more intensely than adults. I think "who earns least should eat least" was the rule among poor families in pre-modern societies. Indeed in my childhood I was told this rule quite often by my father. So I take Dickens's 'child as he was' as a concessive clause to mean 'though he was a child'. I think this would be supported by Dickens' uses of [N as SV] construct in his other novel "Nicholas Nickleby";
"It might have been that Sir Mulberry remembered, that, knave and usurer as he was, he must, in some early time of infancy, have twined his arm about her father's neck." (Dickens; Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 38)
"The waiter was touched. Waiter as he was, he had human passions and feelings, and he looked very hard at Miss Squeers as he handed the muffins." (Dickens; Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 39)

Also, it occurs to me that âfrontingâ of the noun is common in e.g. early alliterative poetry in Germanic languages. So we would have to go a long way back to find evidence of ellipses. And I suppose you couldn't 'front', if you included the article...and there's nowhere else to put it...

I tried to look for the origin of this kind of usage in OED but it was a vain work. But as you know well, historically speaking, the English language had not indefinite articles at least at the time of Old English in which people could discriminate singular and plural by the noun's declensional form. So they said the way like "MrP is good man" (MrP iss god mon). Noun declension systems being degenerated, use of "a/an" gradually got popular and the sentence structure had been changed into the one like "MrP is a good man". But still now you would often use a singular countable noun without articles especially when you talk about person's quality or profession. For example: "Ms Condoleezza Rice is more scholar than politician". So I don't think it is curious the noun in [N as SV] constructs does not take an indefinite article. Another reason people disincline to put "a/an" to the noun in [N as SV] constructs might be that "a/an" cannot be stressed so much in narration. I think the construct [N as S V] is used not only as concession but also as to emphasize the fronted word and the word should be stressed. So it would be quite inconvenient for emphasis if the noun is headed by weakly pronounced a or an. This is my humble opinion and it has no firm grounds.

paco