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Is the following paragraph okay?

Syria turned into a battlefield in 2011. Since then, many Syrian people have been driven out of their country. A great majority of them are flooding into Europe.

Apollyon
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1 Answers1

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There's nothing wrong with it.
It starts with simple past, sets a new time frame with since then and uses have been driven to establish the fact of the exodus, and describes the result with are flooding, a process that is continuing up to the present from the reservoir of displaced people.

Yes, Appolyon, your fused sentence works fine.

In fact, the flooding is subsequent to have been driven.

(I am answering the OP's question/comments here, because the software here suddenly won't let me make comments anywhere. It also no longer supplies a window to display the result of what I am typing in the composition window, and it asks me to complete a capcha to post or edit my answer. What a mess...)

Jack O'Flaherty
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  • Can the second and third sentences be fused into one? "Since then, many Syrian people have been driven out of their country, a great majority of them flooding into Europe." – Apollyon Dec 09 '21 at 00:05
  • Some people say the participial construction cannot be used to indicate a later event unless it is the result of an earlier action. – Apollyon Dec 09 '21 at 01:00
  • In this thread (https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/303561/and-fixed-himself-a-cup-of-coffee-fixing-himself-a-cup-of-coffee/303606#303606), people say "John got up at 7:30, fixing himself a cup of coffee" is wrong; making coffee was subsequent to John's getting up. – Apollyon Dec 09 '21 at 01:13
  • In that example, I don't see any reason not to use fixed - it's all in the past, and it sounds as if he was fixing while he got up. In your fused example, have been driven establishes a present condition that makes flooding from a reservoir of refugees possible. This may be a question of reasonable meaning, rather than grammar. – Jack O'Flaherty Dec 09 '21 at 01:28
  • Something happened to my Firefox browser such that I had to switch to Chrome to make comments. Sorry about that. – Jack O'Flaherty Dec 09 '21 at 01:30
  • But one could also argue that John's getting up establishes a condition that made his fixing a coffee possible. Still, the use of the present participle "fixing" seems weird. – Apollyon Dec 09 '21 at 01:33
  • I'm trying to figure out what makes such rewriting into present participial constructions possible or impossible. – Apollyon Dec 09 '21 at 01:34