Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[dido4]

A book says:
She sometimes helps children near her house with their homework.

1.Can I write this way:
She sometimes helps children with their homework near her house.

2.What's the difference between these two? Or Which one is correct?

I don'd know how to write these kinds of sentences in correct lecial order.
Thank you.

[+Immune+]

There's no difference between these two sentences.

I'm afraid there's also no lexical order needed in here. The thing is, every time you come up with such sentence, you must decide which information(in the sentence you wrote, there are two!) is more important. According to your sentence, the lexical order depends on the importance of given information. If you wanna underline that the person(She) helps children with homework - you must put the part(with their homework) as the first one. It means the action of helping children with their homework is the root of the sentence.
In the second case, you do the same by putting "near her house" in front of the second information.

If you decide that all information in the sentence are equally important - the way you're gonna it, is totally up to you.
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[LucentShade]

To me, there is a difference--

"She sometimes helps children near her house with their homework" means that the children are near her house--the children live in the same area as she does.

"She sometimes helps children with their homework near her house." means that the action of "homework help" is taking place near the house, without any information on whether the children come from far away or if they live nearby.

It all depends on how we interpret "near her house" -- does it modify "helps" or "children"? In my mind, in 1), it modifies "children" and is not a prepositional phrase that denotes location. In a similar sentence, like "The policy questioned everyone near the scene of the accident," the most natural interpretation would be, "The police questioned everyone who was near the scene of the accident," with "near the scene of the accident" forming a sort of implied relative clause--it's a relative clause with the relative pronoun and the verb omitted in the first sentence. Again, I can't imagine a meaning of, "Near the scene of the accident, the police questioned everyone." When in that kind of order, the phrase acts as a describing phrase, not an indication of place.