0

Can the following sentence be naturally rewritten as one containing a participial construction?

a. Those refugees were driven out of their country and headed / and were heading to Germany.

b. Those refugees were driven out of their country, heading to Germany.

Apollyon
  • 5,986
  • 8
  • 42
  • 90
  • I think version (b) is clumsy. You might encounter that kind of construction in a "poetic" context, but to my mind it's at the very least "awkward" to discard EITHER the conjunction *and* OR the auxiliary verb *were* here. To discard BOTH of them is definitely not good! – FumbleFingers Dec 05 '21 at 12:38
  • I'm looking for conditions on what constitutes a good participial clause. This one seems OK: John walked out of his room, slamming the door behind him (= and slammed the door behind him). – Apollyon Dec 05 '21 at 12:40
  • But what makes the participial construction OK in one case but not in the other? – Apollyon Dec 05 '21 at 12:44
  • Exactly what I said. Half of the reason (b) is awkward is becauseyou discarded the conjunction *and. The other* half of the reason is because you discarded the auxiliary *were. I'm advising you to forget both* of these "syntactic devices", I'm sure you know enough about English syntax to be aware that there's no fundamental syntactic rule being broken by (b). But it's just not idiomatic, so you should forget it. This isn't a matter of you learning some "deep" idea about grammar - it's just a matter of certain forms becoming idiomatically established, whereas others aren't. – FumbleFingers Dec 05 '21 at 12:52
  • ...There's also a little bit of clumsiness about juxtaposing *were driven out [of X]* (involuntary; something was done *to* them) and *were heading [for Y]* (voluntary; they chose the destination). But I wouldn't overstate that - it's just a fine point of "style advice". – FumbleFingers Dec 05 '21 at 12:57
  • How about this? Those refugees left their country, heading to Germany. – Apollyon Dec 05 '21 at 13:00
  • Yes, that's fine. Is there a point to your line of questioning here? – FumbleFingers Dec 05 '21 at 13:08
  • 1
    @Apollyon Both construction are okay (in my understanding), but you may consider changing the word/phrase order. It is because in your example, you cannot bring the participial phrase at the beginning, like "Heading to Germany, those refugees were driven out of their country". But you could do that if the sentence had been, "Driven out of their country, those refugees headed to Germany." – Airforce Dec 05 '21 at 13:08

0 Answers0