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jangsalgida
Joined: 11 Jan 2006
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 Posted: Sun May 07, 2006 9:41 pm Post subject: grammar |
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Which is the best way to say the following phrase...?
The dog frightened away the wolf from the sheep.
Or...
The dog frightened the wolf away from the sheep.
I myself think either way is fine. |
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cubanlord
Joined: 08 Jul 2005
Location: In Japan!
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| Posted: Sun May 07, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: |
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| I would say the second one because you want the verb closes to the noun that is receiving the action. |
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out of context
Joined: 08 Jan 2006
Location: Daejeon
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| Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 12:59 am Post subject: |
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| The second one definitely sounds more natural to me. If you eliminated "from the sheep", they would both sound OK, but I think it's preferable to keep "away from" as a unit and not break it apart. |
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jangsalgida
Joined: 11 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 1:41 am Post subject: |
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| Thank you folks for your reasoning. I also thought the 2nd way sounded more natural. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 6:55 pm Post subject: |
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| jangsalgida wrote: |
Which is the best way to say the following phrase...?
The dog frightened away the wolf from the sheep.
Or...
The dog frightened the wolf away from the sheep.
I myself think either way is fine. |
Interesting question. Both sentences are grammatical. Without a context, it's not clear to me that one is better than the other. What's going on here is that 'frighten away' is a phrasal verb, and in phrasal verbs, the adverbial particle (here, 'away') can sometimes occur separated from the main verb by another constituent of the sentence.
In many sentences (but not these ones) this flexibility allows different constituents to occupy final position in the sentence. Functional analyses argue that final position is used to present what is 'new' in the sentence, what is newsworthy or what the speaker wants the listener to attend to in relation to the topic (which is often the grammatical subject of the sentence).
Compare the following two sentences:
He cleaned up the room.
He cleaned the room up.
In the first sentence, 'the room' is the final constituent. What is being emphasized as news in the sentence is what was cleaned. In the second sentence, the adverbial particle 'up', part of the discontinuous constituent 'cleaned up', is final. The emphasis here is on the cleaning, and perhaps especially how complete it was (compare, 'He cleaned the room').
In the OP's two sentences, such an analysis is not possible because the particle cannot be moved to final position in the sentence. I would still argue, though, that the alternation has something to do with differences in the presentation of information by speaker to the listener. cubanlord may be on to something in his comment, but I can't be entirely sure of that. I'd need to look at a lot more sentences like these in context to start to draw conlcusions. This may turn out to be one of those areas of grammar that Dave Willis has described as 'too subtle and complex' to be captured in simple, rule-based explanations. We may have to go at best with 'feel'. And in terms of teaching, it may be more valuable to help learners get a feel for these kinds of sentences than to try to explain the difference in rules.
Just for the record, I don't think 'away from' is a unit here. There is a complex preposition 'away from' but the fact that the two sentences above share the same meaning (propositional content), supports the interpretation of 'frightened away' as a phrasal verb. If 'away from' were a complex preposition here, part of the constituent 'away from the sheep', we would expect the sentence, 'Away from the sheep the dog frightened the wolf' to have the same meaning as the second sentence in the OP and I don't think it does.
Sorry to take so much space with this, but this is actually a really interesting grammar problem. It doesn't have a clear, simple answer. I thank jangsalgida for bringing it to my attention. I'll look for more sentences like these now to try to figure out what's going on.
Last edited by Woland on Thu May 11, 2006 9:56 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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out of context
Joined: 08 Jan 2006
Location: Daejeon
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| Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 7:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Out of context, it's not clear that one is better than the other. |
Well, I'm not the one who makes decisions for all English speakers, but I know which one sounds clearly better to me. Maybe a survey is in order.
| Quote: |
| If 'away from' were a complex preposition here, part of the constituent 'away from the sheep', we would expect the sentence, 'Away from the sheep the dog frightened the wolf' to have the same meaning as the second sentence in the OP and I don't think it does. |
This is probably because when we move parts of the sentence, they are usually adjuncts and not complements. As such, we naturally prefer the adjunct reading ("The dog, while located at a significant distance from the sheep, frightened the wolf"), and only when content dictates that the complement reading must be true will we interpret it that way. And though I think we can accept this forced reading, the analysis where "away" and "from the sheep" are separate constituents seems to give rise to "From the sheep the dog frightened the wolf away", which I'm fairly confident will please no one.
Analogous constructions might be:
He pulled out a book./He pulled a book out.
He pulled a book out of the desk./?He pulled out a book of the desk.
Out of the desk he pulled a book.
(You could also say "He pulled a book out from the desk./He pulled out a book from the desk." In this case, it's not a complex preposition.)
She pulled a chair up./She pulled up a chair.
She pulled a chair up to the table./?She pulled up a chair to the table.
Up to the table she pulled a chair.
(The example of "She pulled up a chair to the table" may be acceptable to some. I think it may be because "up to" can be analyzed either as a complex preposition or not.) |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 9:53 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="out of context"]
| Quote: |
| Out of context, it's not clear that one is better than the other. |
Well, I'm not the one who makes decisions for all English speakers, but I know which one sounds clearly better to me. Maybe a survey is in order.
My apologies, out of context. I used your name there by accident (Must have been influenced by seeing it in the thread; now I feel like a Harvard plagiarizer). The reference wasn't to you and I will edit my post to make that clear. I certainly don't claim to speak for all English speakers, just myself.
I have to get ready for class now; more later on the rest of your post. I wanted to clear this up right away, though. |
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out of context
Joined: 08 Jan 2006
Location: Daejeon
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| Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 10:00 pm Post subject: |
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I see what you mean. When one makes one's user name a commonly used expression, one should ostensibly know better. It appears that I naturally prefer the narcissistic reading.  |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 7:40 am Post subject: |
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[quote="out of context"]
| Quote: |
| This is probably because when we move parts of the sentence, they are usually adjuncts and not complements. As such, we naturally prefer the adjunct reading ("The dog, while located at a significant distance from the sheep, frightened the wolf"), and only when content dictates that the complement reading must be true will we interpret it that way. And though I think we can accept this forced reading, the analysis where "away" and "from the sheep" are separate constituents seems to give rise to "From the sheep the dog frightened the wolf away", which I'm fairly confident will please no one. |
You are right about adjunct readings being preferred, but I suspect that both readings with fronted elements are forced because the fronting involves making these elements into textual themes. Textual themes require context to make real sense and there is no real context given here.
| Quote: |
Analogous constructions might be:
He pulled out a book./He pulled a book out.
He pulled a book out of the desk./?He pulled out a book of the desk.
Out of the desk he pulled a book.
(You could also say "He pulled a book out from the desk./He pulled out a book from the desk." In this case, it's not a complex preposition.) |
I agree with this analysis. 'Out of' can only be a complex preposition in this context.
| Quote: |
She pulled a chair up./She pulled up a chair.
She pulled a chair up to the table./?She pulled up a chair to the table.
Up to the table she pulled a chair.
(The example of "She pulled up a chair to the table" may be acceptable to some. I think it may be because "up to" can be analyzed either as a complex preposition or not.) |
I have no problem with the sentence you have marked as doubtful. So for me, the sentence 'She pulled a chair up to the table' is ambiguous and can be read as involving either a phrasal verb or a complex preposition.
My sense from what you've written is that you would reject the OP's sentence 'The dog frightened away the wolf from the sheep'. Is this right? It doesn't seem that way for me. I may have been led to the phrasal verb reading because of the two sample sentences presented. I assumed the OP presented them because they had the same propositional content. Given that assumption, the phrasal verb reading is a natural.
The verb 'frighten away' may be problematic in and of itself, though, because 'frighten' by itself doesn't include the sense of motion in itself that the phrasal verb has (compare with more typical phrasal verbs with 'away' like 'chase away', 'run away', etc.). This may make it seem that the complex prepostional reading is more natural, and lead to rejection of the phrasal verb reading.
In short, this is the kind of problem that doesn't necessarily have a single, neat solution. These sentences stand at the boundaries of the grammatical system and different speakers will likely respond to them differently. I don't know if we can go further than that. |
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