mundasingh123 wrote:Thanks Ashley for coming to our rescue
(C) more than likely beginning from --> "beginning from" renders the entire (non-)sentence a fragment
According to scholars, the earliest writing was probably not a direct rendering of speech, but
was more likely to begin as a separate and distinct symbolic system of communication, and only later merged with spoken language.
(C) more than likely beginning from
The sentence has the structure
Was Not X , But Y and Z
I came across a number of SCs on Parallelism in which i read that the X , Y , and Z should be Parallel ie X,Y and Z should all have prepositions if 1 of them has a preposition .The same with verbs,adjectives etc.
So Here in this sentence , we have " was " is before
Not X But Y , and Z
You said
(C) more than likely beginning from --> "beginning from" renders the entire (non-)sentence a fragment
Doesnt the
was before Not X But Y , and Z serve as a helping verb for all X, Y and Z .
In C , Y has
beginning and there is was before "Not X But Y and Z "
So how can C turn the sentence into a fragment ?
Ashley could you please help me understand this Subtlety in structure
Ah, I think I understand your question (I hope!). You're totally right that we're free to extend the "was" over all the parts X, Y, and Z when looking for parallelism. (The rules of parallelism are pretty flexible in general, and basically if there's *any* way you can argue that the sentence is parallel, it is -- so extending a "was" to help all the parts is certainly within the realm of reasonable!) But let's look at what happens if we extend the "was" in this sentence and plug in option (C) (I'm cutting out some modifiers that are not essential to the grammar, just to pare the sentence down some). The sentence then can basically be chopped into three short implied sentences:
Writing was (1) not a rendering of speech. -and-
Writing was (2) likely beginning from a separate system. -and-
Writing was (3) later merged with spoken language.
(1) is obviously fine. (3) is okay, too -- I'd slightly prefer not to have a "was" before only later merged, because it sacrifices an active voice construction ("writing later merged") for a passive voice one ("writing was later merged"), but passive voice isn't a deal-breaker, so that's okay.
(2), though, is problematic. If I say "writing was likely beginning," I'm using the past progressive (or past continuous, whichever you prefer to call it -- those terms are interchangeable), and the past continuous -- like all the continuous tenses -- suggests something with duration, something that was (or is, or will be, in the cases of present continuous and future continuous respectively) an ongoing process over some time period. But the verb "begin" kind of resists that idea, since by definition, to begin is to start, and once you've started, you're no longer in the process of starting*. So we really can't say "language was beginning as a separate and distinct symbolic system" -- rather, it just BEGAN as that system (simple past tense).
So, if you consider the sentence in that fashion, you're right, you don't get a fragment, but you get an error in tense (a past progressive where past progressive doesn't work). I guess I didn't consider the sentence in that fashion (maybe because I automatically resisted creating a past progressive verb) -- instead, I considered "beginning" to be a present participle constituting part of a modifier ("beginning from a separate and distinct symbolic system of communication"). If we view it in that fashion, THEN we wind up with a sentence fragment, because that modifier never gets a subject after the comma to modify.
