Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Samuel1]

Hi,

From today's New York Times Online (www.nytimes.com) :

"Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora" By LYDIA POLGREEN

"Summary:
Ghana hopes descendants of enslaved Africans will think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire. "

MY QUESTION: I would think the correct parallel construction would be more like this -- do you agree?

Ghana hopes descendants of enslaved Africans will think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, to invest (in), to send their children to be educated (in) and even retire (to).

Please comment.

Thanks

[Nef]

Ghana hopes descendants of enslaved Africans will think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire. "

MY QUESTION: I would think the correct parallel construction would be more like this -- do you agree?

Ghana hopes descendants of enslaved Africans will think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, to invest (in), to send their children to be educated (in) and even retire (to).

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Hello. I thought this was an excellent question. I see your point but, personally, I had no problem with the form of the original sentence. (Other people may not agree with me on this.)

When I read the original version, I perceived the "TO" (before "visit") as being distributed throughout the sentence, in the way you actually placed it: "to visit, to invest, to send their children to be educated, even to retire." But, because I'm usually very comfortable reading English, I did this almost automatically. A big reason why I COULD do this here is that the original form is correct in the way "to" works with all the additional verbs.

For instance, if the writer had said "to visit, invest, sending their children to be educated and even retire," that would have confused me ("HUH?") and made me go back to try to understand better. "To" and "sending" do not work together.

I'm trying to find an analogy in math, which has the distributive property.
For instance, if I remember correctly,
a(b + c + d + e) = (ab) + (ac) + (ad) + (ae)

Here, think of: to (visit + invest + send + retire) =
(to visit) + (to invest) + (to send) + (to retire)

You preferred the second version, I also like the first version because it is a little shorter. I hope this helps!