Sentence Correction

Hey

Please help me out with these underlined modifiers,I tend to make mistakes.

A recent formed militia,consisting of lightly armed peasants and a few retired army officers,is fighting a bitterly civil war against government forces.

I dont understand the Adjective Adjective Noun and the Adverb Adjective Noun philosophy.

Even in these sentences-

James Joyce is Max's supposedly Irish ancestor

Answer- James Joyce is Max's supposed Irish ancestor

Max's grandmother is his supposed Irish ancestor

Answer-Max's grandmother is his supposedly Irish ancestor

Please explain what the word modifying means too..

Thanks

Dan

Hi Dan,

Honestly, I don't understand why "James is Max's supposed Irish ancestor" is right but "Max's grandmother is his supposed Irish ancestor is wrong. After all, both sentences can be simplified to "X is his supposed Irish ancestor".

What I can say though is that an adjective cannot be used to modify another adjective. Only adverbs modify adjectives.

>> "Supposed Irish ancestor" is correct if we want "Supposed" to modify "ancestor". In other words, the sentence would raise doubts as to whether the person is indeed an ancestor.

>> "Supposedly Irish ancestor" would be correct if "Irish" itself was the target of "supposedly". In other words, the sentence would raise doubts as to whether the ancestor is indeed Irish.

As another example, in your initial sentence we have the phrase "a bitterly civil war". "bitterly" is an adverb, so it can only be right if we want to modify the adjective "civil", ie. if we wish to say that the war was "bitterly civil". This doesn't make much sense; it makes more sense to say that the war was "bitter". So we need "a bitter civil war" where the adjective "bitter" doesn't modify "civil" itself (adjective cannot modify adjective), but rather "civil war" or just "war".

Two SCs that test this sort of distinction:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/qn-200-from- ... cityevent=
https://www.beatthegmat.com/adjective-vs ... 22392.html