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The Music of Movable Phrases |
From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar.
"The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
From Mars" is widely considered to be one of the best
rock music albums of all time.
The album helped make the British singer David Bowie
world-famous.
The songs on Ziggy Stardust tell about a fictional rock
star. The music is not only fun to listen to. It can
help you better understand the workings of the English
language, too.
Consider the song "Starman." Listen carefully to some of
the words:
There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
There's a starman waiting in the sky
Today, we will explore -- much like the larger-than-life
personalities in Bowie's album -- a really large space.
This area is called movability -- or the way English
speakers are able to move words or expressions to
different places in a sentence.
However, to keep from going too far into outer space, we
will study just one kind of movable modifier: the
participial phrase.
What are participial phrases?
In an earlier Everyday Grammar program, we talked about
present participial phrases. These are groups of words
that begin with the present participle, or –ing, form of
the verb. Such phrases often act like adjectives in a
sentence. They describe or can influence the meaning of
other words.
Think back to David Bowie's song. The first words you
heard were:
"There is a starman waiting in the sky…"
In the song lyrics, the participial phrase 'waiting in
the sky' is acting like an adjective. It has an effect
on the noun 'starman.'
In Bowie's song, the participial phrase comes at the end
of the sentence.
But some participial phrases can move to different
places in a sentence -- depending on how the sentence is
structured.
When participial phrases act as non-restrictive
modifiers, they can move around in the sentence. A
nonrestrictive modifier does not define a noun; instead,
it only adds information or comments on the noun. You
can read about these modifiers in another Everyday
Grammar program.
When these phrases move to different places, they can
come at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence.
Movable participial phrases
One common adjectival participial phrase comes after the
noun it is modifying - often in the middle of a
sentence. Here is an example:
"My friends, walking at night, used headlamps."
The noun phrase, "my friends," is exact in meaning. The
participial phrase "walking at night" acts like an
adjective. It gives information about the subject, "my
friends."
If you wanted to move the participial phrase to the
beginning of the sentence, you could say, "Walking at
night, my friends used headlamps."
Or if you wanted to move the participial phrase to the
end of the sentence, you could say, "My friends used
headlamps, walking at night."
All of these sentences have the same basic meaning.
Moving phrases changes the sound
of a sentence
But there is an important difference between all of
these sentences: the way they sound.
When reading aloud, the pitch of your voice goes up and
down at different places in each sentence. These
changes, along with brief stoppages in the sentence,
help direct attention to certain words and phrases.
When you change the usual position of a participial
phrase, after an important noun, you are drawing more
attention to its placement. *
Understanding this idea will not only help you
understand the music of grammar – the up and down sounds
of a voice while speaking English. It will also help you
understand how to place emphasis on different ideas.
Many great musicians, poets, and speechwriters use
movable phrases when they are writing or speaking, even
if they do not consciously think about it.
They want to make sure an important word or idea comes
at certain parts of a sentence. They also want to offer
a mix in the sentence structures they use.
Moving adjectives, such as participial phrases, to
different places in a sentence is one way to meet this
objective.
How you can move phrases to
highlight certain ideas
So how does this principle work?
In general, the most important information comes at the
end of a sentence, says Martha Kolln, a grammar expert.
Important information can come at the beginning of a
sentence, too.
So, when the participial phrase ends the sentence "My
friends used headlamps, walking at night." The
participial phrase receives great emphasis. When you
write or speak this sentence, you are suggesting that
"walking at night" is important information.
When you put the participial phrase at the beginning of
the sentence, "Walking at night, my friends used
headlamps," it gets some emphasis. You draw the listener
or reader's attention to the information in the
participial phrase by its placement – away from the noun
it is modifying.
The participial phrase gets the least amount of emphasis
when it is in the middle of the sentence: For example,
"My friends, walking at night, used headlamps."
These different grammatical structures are used
differently depending on the situation. So, while you
might hear some structures at a poetry or book reading,
you might not hear them when Americans are talking with
one another.
Can you create sentences with
movable phrases?
The important points in this discussion are the
following: participial phrases often act as adjectives,
sometimes move to different places in a sentence and
always modify the subject when they are set off by
commas.
When you understand these principles, you will be able
to write and speak more elegant sentences in English.
Naturally, there are other ways to change the meaning of
a sentence. We will explore this in another Everyday
Grammar program.
We will leave you today with some homework. Can you move
the participial phrase to the beginning or end of this
sentence?
The crowd, laughing loudly, stood and clapped.
I'm Jill Robbins.
And I'm John Russell.
John Russell wrote this story for VOA Learning English.
George Grow was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments
Section or on our Facebook page.
* Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar 3rd edition (pgs.
162-169) |
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