The spectacular disintegration

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by lunarpower » Sat Dec 10, 2011 6:18 am
i received a private message regarding this thread.
vishal.pathak wrote:I have read that a sentence with verd-ed or verb-ing and without a helping verb is a fragment. This law will make A,B,C & D as fragments.
i certainly hope you didn't read this about all -ED constructions. almost all verbs in the simple past tense -- one of the most common tenses in the whole language -- end with -ED!

it is true that -ING constructions can't be verbs by themselves, but you can't say that a sentence is a fragment just because you see an -ING construction somewhere. those constructions, by themselves, are extremely common modifiers.

the -ED forms can be past-tense verbs, but they can also be past participles. if you don't understand what that means, or how those constructions work, then use google to search "english past participle"; you should be able to find hundreds, even thousands, of pages with detailed examples.
it's true that one of these past participles can't be the main verb of a sentence -- but, when you see an -ED form, you need to use the context of the sentence (along with common sense) to determine whether it is acting as a verb or as a participle.

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in any case, if you see a construction that can't be the main verb of a sentence, that doesn't automatically mean that the sentence is a fragment -- it just means that the main verb needs to be somewhere else.
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.

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