English native speakers: please help with one sentence

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echo73
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English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by echo73 »

Hi!

Could you please tell me whether the followong sentence is possible in English / grammatically correct:

"The toast Sally ate, the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

The word order is odd (starting with the objects), but I'm not sure... sometimes, there is inversion in English, too, I just don't know if this one is a possible one or not - ???

Thanks in advance!

echo73
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Perles76
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Post by Perles76 »

I'm not a native speaker, but I think this sentence is correct. The word order gives what we call in French 'emphase', that is it draws the attention on the object. C'est un effet de style.
echo73
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Post by echo73 »

Salut Perles,
thank you for your answer!

In German, we can also use different word orders to emphasize things. I'm still doubtful, though, about the English sentence, because I know that English has quite restrictive syntax rules.

German and French both have a comparatively rich flectional morphology, i.e. they still have quite a lot of different grammatical endings, which the English language hasn't. Usually, languages with much flectional morphology have many options for different word orders, whereas languages with reduced morphology have a very limited set of word order patterns (e.g. in English, you often couldn't tell a subject from an object if it wasn't for the position in the sentence, because the verb gives you no clues).

Regards,
echo
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Perles76
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Post by Perles76 »

I had never thought of English and French this way, but this is interesting.

As for your sentence, toast and meat need to have been mentioned earlier in the text to use this sentence. In French we say that they are 'déterminés'. This is the only case you could find such a sentence in a book. I still think this sentence is correct in that case.
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Post by Guest »

I would say it's correct, if a bit unusual. I think it's what would be called a conjuction, but I never cared much for analysis of grammar. One could also write:

Sally ate the toast but she did not touch the meat because she was a vegetarian.
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Post by Guest »

"The toast Sally ate, the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

The word order is odd (starting with the objects), but I'm not sure... sometimes, there is inversion in English, too, I just don't know if this one is a possible one or not - ???
Hello, native speaker here! ;)

It's grammatically correct, but just slightly awkward and obviously an attempt at being poetic (all or most inversion of this type is "creative license" of some kind in English, such as say, you could say in something like a book title, "The Stone Forgotten", even though normally you would either say "The Stone That [Was/Is/Has Been/Had Been] Forgotten" or "The Forgotten Stone". It's considered poetic. And often snobby, actually).

Normally, you would put a word such as "though", "although", "however", or "but" after the first comma and before "the meat", though, or else replace the comma with a semicolon (you know, the ; punctuation mark). As a writer I'd definitely recommend this to improve what writers and editors would usually call the sentence's "flow".

Doing that changes the feel and flow of the sentence in different ways, though, most of which are very subtle:

"The toast Sally ate, but the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

- Sounds more simplistic than...

"The toast Sally ate, however the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

or

"The toast Sally ate, however, the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

- "However" has a more educated and sometimes snobbish, more intellectual sound to it. The comma, which adds an additional bit of pause and subtle emphasis on the rest of the sentence, I think increases that sense of intellectualism. The rest of the sentence seems to have what I'd call a clean and simplistic, straightforward sound to it, though, so I'd recommend using "but".

"The toast Sally ate, though the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

- Well, grammarians might flinch, but it works in colloquial English. :P However, it sounds weird to use that and then use no contraction for "did not", because a lack of contractions in American English, at least, has a simplistic and/or emphatic and/or intellectualist sound to it.

"The toast Sally ate; the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian."

- This one I like the most (hey, another case of inversion for you; normally you'd say "I like this one the most", but for emphasis, you can put "this one" in front instead). :) Depending on the context, the connotation can have a lot more feeling and emphasis (it really does emphasize the second part of the sentence there. Also, if she's bothered by the fact that the meat's there for whatever reason, that can also subtly hint at that due to the kind of emphasis it places on the fact that she "did not touch" the meat), and it isn't nearly as awkward.

Side note: "did not touch" can have very subtle connotations of emphasis (as all non-contractions in cases where you'd normally use a contraction tend to, but also because "didn't touch" or "did not touch" has a connotation of "did not even go, nor want to go, nor technically or metaphorically was she able to go, anywhere near it"). Again, as a writer, I like this. Other than putting a bit of variety in the sentence, the connotations are neat. :) She sounds like maybe, just maybe, she's a really devoted vegetarian not just for say, health reasons, but because she actually feels that eating meat is wrong.

Then again, I'm digging deep here with my Analyzation Brain more than my Linguistic Brain - again, I'm a writer. :lol: I think a lot, perhaps too much even, about "subtle connotations" of things.

Hope that helps!


-Runa27
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Post by Stormwoken »

The phrase is perfectly correct. What you have there is an example of syntactic topicalisation. It is a technique used for emphasizing.
Topics are "the toast" and "the meat".
You can tell whether your topics are ok by shifting places. eg:

Sally ate the toast, she did not touch the meat because she was a vegetarian.

Some good stylistic point there, Runa27 :)
Tyori
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by Tyori »

This sounds so normal to me... I would consider this better than average english, actually. A step above the common drabble. XP
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MikeChongbro
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by MikeChongbro »

:loljump: I like the grammar of the original sentence.

some say "Where do you come from?"
some say "Where you from?"

Not a think wong about the Sally sentence brother. I understood it perfectly. :jap:
swvaroot
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by swvaroot »

"The toast Sally ate, the meat she did not touch because she was a vegetarian." is understandable, aber in Virginia USA we might say, "Since Sally is vegetarian she eat the toast but did not touch the meat. ( . . . but not the meat.)


As they say in English word-order is more important. I am struggling to understand German case. :P
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by Beaumont »

swvaroot wrote:she eat the toast but did not touch the meat
Really?? :-o
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solbjerg
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by solbjerg »

Hi Beaumont
Well, she probably only ate the toast and not the meat because she was a vegetarian. :-)
I would have eaten the meat and left the toast for her - because someone had told me she was a vegetarian :-)
Cheers
solbjerg

Beaumont wrote:
swvaroot wrote:she eat the toast but did not touch the meat
Really?? :-o
Last edited by solbjerg on 10 Dec 2009 10:59, edited 1 time in total.
Katya
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by Katya »

Hi,
Actually, questions of style aside, I believe the sentence is not grammatically correct because it combines two independent clauses with a comma. This is a mistake known as a "comma splice." You could write the two clauses as separate independent sentences or combine them with a semi-colon or a conjugation. Stylistically, I think it works in the context of describing some food that was served. For example, "Mrs. Smith cooked a huge breakfast of ham and eggs, and served it with toast and homemade jelly. The toast Sally ate, but the meat she did not touch." The reason it works stylistically is that this keeps the old concept (the food) at the beginning of the sentence, and the new concept (who ate it) at the end of the sentence.
-Katya
ElieDeLeuze
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Re: English native speakers: please help with one sentence

Post by ElieDeLeuze »

Fascinating... I've never seen two native english speakers agreeing with each other. I don't ask anymore, I just write bad english. Good luck. :lol:
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