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desultude
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Location: Dangling my toes in the Persian Gulf
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 Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 4:22 am Post subject: |
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| Kimchieluver wrote: |
| I thought desultude was drunk when she asked the question. |
Cute.
No, quite sober, if a bit tired.
So, kimchieluver, do you understand the question and have an answer? |
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Kimchieluver
Joined: 02 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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Actually I don't really understand the question, therefore no answer.
I have long given up on some of the questions my Korean friends ask me. They have a conglish word or something that has no meaning in Korean or English and think it must be an English word. Sometimes. So instead of racking my brain for twenty to thirty minutes I spend about five minutes and tell them to come back to me with an example or an actuall word and what context it is used in. |
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desultude
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Location: Dangling my toes in the Persian Gulf
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 6:32 pm Post subject: |
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Okay, to simplify the question down to what I think the essence is:
In the sentence "The town of Mobile was the hardest hit by the storm", is "hit" functioning as a verb or as an addjective?
My opinion is that the phrase "the hardest hit by the storm" is a subject complement defining Mobile. I would be clearly that if the sentence said "the hardest hit town by the storm", but repeating town is not necessary.
This is actually not a konglish question, it is a perfectly legitimate question of grammar asked by a Korean English teacher of good ability to a teacher trainer. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| In the sentence "The town of Mobile was the hardest hit by the storm", is "hit" functioning as a verb or as an adjective? |
'Hit' is the past participle but you ask if it's functioning as a verb or adjective.
Take the bare passive:
"Mobile was hit"
Here 'hit' can only be a verb because it can't modify a noun. You can't say "the hit town". So it's a passive voice sentence.
Your original sentence was
| Quote: |
| The town of Mobile was one of the hardest hit by the storm. |
Here 'one of the hardest hit' is an adjectival phrase because it can modify a noun, e.g. "One of the hardest hit towns recovered soonest". So 'hit' has to be an adjective even though, confusingly, the sentence has 'by the storm' tacked on the end as an object complement making it look like a passive voice sentence.
In your sentence above you left out the 'one of' part but 'hit' is still an adjective because of the word order. Normally it goes subject-verb-adverb, e.g. 'He hit the hardest', not 'He the hardest hit'.
Compare:
1.) "The town of Mobile was the hardest hit by the storm" ('hit' is an adjective)
2.) "The town of Mobile was hit the hardest by the storm" ('hit' is a verb, passive voice)
Anyway, if you make it 'one of the hardest' rather than just 'the hardest' it can only go in front of 'hit'.
Another example:
"Syd was affected the most by the incident." ('affected' is a verb, passive voice)
"Syd was the most affected by the incident." ('affected' is an adjective hence you can say "The most affected person left the room.")
Hell, I'm still not sure this is right. These are all equivalent:
1.)'Mobile was one of the hardest hit by the storm' (your original sentence)
2.)'Mobile was one of the towns hardest hit by the storm'
3.)'Mobile was one of the towns that was hardest hit by the storm'
In sentence 3 'hit' is part of a relative clause and therefore a verb. So arguably it's still a verb in number 1, only right now I'm too tired to think about how you could argue the pros and cons.
Maybe there are just two possible ways to interpret the sentence. You can think of 'hit' as either a verb or adjective and it doesn't make any difference to the meaning. Hope this helps. |
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Kimchieluver
Joined: 02 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 9:25 pm Post subject: |
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I was stuck on 'parsing'. Sorry late night last night and early wakeup.
I can but don't want to break it all down... I just get tired of terms like'parsing' or some term the koreans made up about English grammar. Beleive I've had a few really intelligent, great speakers of English throw words and terms at me. I used to spend time looking them up to no avail. Then sometimes they come with a korean book that has the term but no example. I re-check .. and e-mail my english professors and they say they they never heard of it. So I just get them to give me examples of what they mean. If they can't I chalk it up to konglish. ... BTW, I never heard of parsing and I am good at grammar.
My first reaction to the post was I thought you were asking about pairing!
Sorry didn't read to much. |
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