3 ms·
> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it? > The line in question, She said goodbye to
by dghf 3y ago
> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence
Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
> The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense.
But it's a song. Prosody can't be held to the same strict rules of tense consistency (or other grammatical rules) as prose. And flipping tenses between lines is hardly an uncommon feature of songwriting. Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's "Boogie Street":
A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it's time to go,
I tidied up the kitchenette,
I tuned the old Banjo.
I'm wanted at the traffic jam
and so on.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoIt is indeed quite common for poetry to violate the normal rules of the language. But that takes one of two forms: archaism, or a flaw in the poetry. (It's also common for poetry to violate the rules that govern the poetry itself. Composing poetry is very difficult!) Compare the opening of Mark Chesnutt's She Was: She started her new life Ten dollars in debt That's all it took to get started back then A trip to the courthouse across the state line No one could stop her She'd made up her mind He was eighteen And she wasn't But she said she was / and never thought twice And came back home as my daddy's wife She just shook her head When her mama said "Are you sure he's the one?" But she was Here we see some fairly complex temporal structure handled fluently, with no problems of any kind. The writing is better. >> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence > Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it? The use of the simple past tense is not compatible with the sense of before that everyone here is trying to assign.