Here’s a grammar predicament that Forum member Miss Mae found herself in sometime ago:
“I couldn’t make heads or tails of this sentence: ‘It
also has oriented its staff to assist this kind of patients.’
“When I wrote that sentence last week, I thought that the verb should come ahead of the adverb ‘also.’ But when I typed the sentence down, it occurred to me that ‘also’ should come first instead. When I read it yesterday, however, it seemed that the verb should really come first. Then, rereading it today, I changed my mind again.
“What should really be the order of the verb and the adverb in that sentence?”
Here’s what I told Miss Mae about that predicament of hers: Your having flip-flopped in positioning “also” in that sentence is understandable, for that adverb happens to be a very versatile and slippery word. It can take various positions in a sentence depending on the intended meaning.
Let’s look closely at your sentence as you first constructed it: “It
also has oriented its staff to assist this kind of patients.”
That sentence, with “also” ahead of “has oriented,” means that the subject “it”—presumably a hospital—has oriented its staff to provide the indicated assistance, and that it did so in addition to other (unspecified) activities for some other entity or entities.
Now let’s see what happens when, as you did as an afterthought, the adverb is placed between the verbal auxiliary “has” and the verb “oriented”: “It has
also oriented its staff to assist this kind of patients.”
This time, the meaning is that the hospital did one or more things to or for its staff other than just orienting them to provide the indicated assistance, and that there were no other entities for which the hospital had undertaken other activities.
There will be at least three other possible meanings when “also” takes various other positions in that sentence:
“
Also, it has oriented its staff to assist this kind of patients.”
“It has oriented its staff
also to assist this kind of patients.”
“It has oriented its staff to
also assist this kind of patients.”
The first two sentence constructions above mean the same thing: that the hospital has oriented its staff to provide the indicated assistance in addition to them doing other tasks or activities. The third sentence construction means that the hospital has oriented its staff to also extend the indicated assistance to the kind of patients referred to, among other kinds of patients.
So, to mean precisely what we what we want to say, we should always be alert to such semantic differences when positioning the adverb “also” in our sentences. (Very often, in fact, we need to vocally test the sentence, playing it by ear to find the optimal position of "also" for our intended sense.)
***
Miss Mae also asked this very interesting subject-verb agreement question:
“Am I just wrong, Sir? This paragraph is from a news story of a foreign publication:
“‘It was a game the UAE
were expected to win to qualify second, behind Iran, to whom
they lost 4-1, in Group B. “Bahrain
are a strong team from what I have seen of
them but I am very hopeful we have the stuff to win this game,” said Ajenoui, the Moroccan-born Portuguese who took charge of the defending champions a month ago.’”
My reply to Miss Mae: No, you aren’t wrong; it’s only that like most Filipinos, you are accustomed to reading American English, where a noun denoting a group, team, company, or organization is considered singular.
However, the paragraph you quoted is evidently from a British publication or from a publication in a country that uses British English. In British English, a group noun is considered plural. This explains why that sports story used the plural past-tense form “were” for the group noun “UAE,” which, of course, is a reference to the team of the United Arab Emirates. The same is true for the use of the plural present-tense “are” for the Bahrain team. (2011)
This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the October 15, 2011 issue of The Manila Times
, © 2011 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
