4 ms·
A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. I'd also hazard to note, at the risk of sounding like a get-off-my-lawn prescriptive grammarian, tha
by RyanMcGreal 16y ago
A judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. I'd also hazard to note, at the risk of sounding like a get-off-my-lawn prescriptive grammarian, that many garden path sentences achieve their ambiguity via hanging prepositions, e.g.:
>The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.
Yet the most general pattern seems to be a simple matter of loading too many words into the subject clause [1], e.g.:
>The car driven past the barn crashed.
We don't reach the verb until the last word, which not only opens the door to ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose. You will produce tighter, sharper sentences by front-loading the predicate verb.
[1] - edited from "too many clauses" as per telemachos's astute reply.
- confuzatron 16y agoA judicious use of commas helps to avoid misinterpretation. Killjoy.
- lkozma 16y ago"..opens the door to ambiguity but also produces flaccid prose." You wouldn't make friends in Germany :)
- lkozma 16y agoor as Twain said: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
- jazzyb 16y agoI have encouraged many of my friends to learn German just so they can understand the comedic brilliance of "The Awful German Language". For those who have studied German but haven't read Twain yet: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language
- ktf 16y agoOr in Japan!
- telemachos 16y agoEnglish is a Germanic language. (Yes, there's other stuff mixed in, but the root is Germanic.) There is a natural tendency for the main verb to go in second position. However, second position does not necessarily mean second (full stop) because of phrase groupings. Your own sentences give good examples. I've put parens to group things and second position is in italics: > (A judicious use of commas) helps ... > (the most general pattern) seems... (I think that the initial adverbial 'Yet' doesn't count for purposes of verb position, but I may be wrong about that. It's been a bit for me...) The thing is that the sentence you quote as a bad example (and it is bad, and should be edited) feels natural, because it follows that rule: > (The car driven past the barn) crashed. There aren't multiple clauses at the front. There is a single (overpacked) noun phrase. I'm not excusing bad writing, but the patterns that underlie your own language can trip you up in surprising ways.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoYou're absolutely right, of course. By "front-load" I don't mean literally the second word; rather, I mean moving the predicate verb as close to the front of the sentence as clarity and flow allow.
- jroes 16y agoWas the "get-off-my-lawn" pun intentional?