Sentence Correction

goelmohit2002 wrote:There is one question in OG that says that "that in E mistakenly introduces a new independent clause rather than a modifying phrase for powers." After looking at the below question, I checked the same in multiple OG questions....the same seems to be followed in OG...but can you please tell is there some rule such as above ?

If there indeed a rule like above, then is the same followed for all the relative pronouns like which/where etc or the same is applicable for "that" only ?

Question(OG-10, Q222) is as below:

By a vote of 9 to 0, the Supreme Court awarded the Central Intelligence Agency broad discretionary powers enabling it to withhold from the public the identities of its sources of intelligence information.
(A) enabling it to withhold from the public
(B) for it to withhold from the public
(C) for withholding disclosure to the public of
(D) that enable them to withhold from public disclosure
(E) that they can withhold public disclosure of

OA = A

no such animal.
i.e., no such rule.

this is idiomatic: with the word "powers", you can't say "powers that X can do Y". because, well, you just can't.

with certain other nouns, though, you can and should use such constructions.
one such noun is "evidence". for instance,
the evidence that Chris had committed the crime was overwhelming
is a perfectly grammatical sentence.

one other important class of these words is the class of words referring to ideas: "idea", "concept", "notion", etc.
the idea that the earth is round seemed ludicrous to people in the middle ages.
the notion that electrons can tunnel through barriers is surprising to beginning students of quantum mechanics.
etc.

sorry that this is an idiom, not a rule; rules are easier.

goelmohit2002 wrote:But if we will not use any coordinating conjunction or do not use "that"...then doesn't the above sentence becomes "Run-on" ?

well, technically, you'd think that, yeah.

but, IF there are official problems that validate this sort of structure, then you just have to consider it as some sort of idiomatic exception to the normal rules.

in other words, just memorize it as a separate structure that is ok, just because it has been given "amnesty" from the normal grammatical rules.

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here's another such exception that has been granted grammatical amnesty:

it is clear that this structure is an exception to the normal rules.

this sort of thing - "it is ADJ that..." - is an exception to the normal rules of pronouns, since the "it" at the beginning doesn't really stand for anything.
it is a valid (and common) structure, so you just have to know it, outside the sphere of the normal rules.

maihuna wrote:

lunarpower wrote:the best of the answer choices in this question is (a). it's not very well written; its clarity would be GREATLY helped by the inclusion of the word "that" after predicted, as stated by a couple of posters already.
however, there have been occasional official problems in which "that" has been omitted. (i don't remember the actual questions, but think about, say, "he said he was going to come" vs. "he said he was going to come" - both are fine.)

(d) is absolutely incorrect, because "predict X to do Y" is unidiomatic.

(e) is also incorrect, because it has the wrong meaning.
here's the difference:
J predicted that the processes would undermine X --> just what it says
J predicted the processes undermining X --> there are some processes that undermine X; J predicted these processes before they were actually known/discovered.

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in any case, the writing here is pretty sloppy. what is the source of the question?

sorry not following it up Ron, its an paper test Q. Test code 55 QN 8.

ah. i see what's going on here.

they really go out of their way to avoid repeated-word constructions such as X THAT Y THAT Z or X OF Y OF Z.
in fact, if you see one of these constructions, you can pretty much trust that it's wrong. they'll switch to lesser idioms, which they wouldn't normally use, in order to avoid these constructions.

here are a couple of examples (taken from official problems, so they are authentic):

* normally, you'd say "evidence that suggests...".
however, in order to avoid "evidence THAT suggests THAT...", one official problem contains the idiom "evidence TO suggest THAT..."

* normally, you'd say "it was said that..."
however, in this problem, you don't want "...so prevalent THAT it was said THAT..."
so you can get around this by killing the second "that".

* if you see something like "extent OF the shift OF light...", you can be 99.9% sure that it's incorrect.

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if they'd included the extra "that" in (a), as i've suggested, then they would have X THAT Y THAT Z.

apparently, they are so strongly opposed to that sort of construction that they will actually reduce the clarity of the sentence in order to avoid it!