Many years ago, India-based reader Surajit Dasgupta wrote me for advice on how best to deal with this sentence whose subject is such a monstrously long noun form: “Isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations have been reported.”
He asked: “How do I reduce the length of the subject? In one of your past columns you suggested that the long subject be broken up. I did try it, but the resulting sentence doesn’t sound natural. Look: ‘
Isolated instances have been reported
of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations.’”
I replied to Surajit that the problem with sentences with a very long noun form as subject is that the operative verb comes too late to execute the action, making such sentences confusing and difficult to read. In that sentence in question whose subject is this 15-word noun phrase, “isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations,” we’d already be gasping for air and might have already forgotten the subject by the time we reach the operative verb “have been reported.” We then have to go back to the beginning of the noun phrase to regain our semantic bearings, thus losing time and reading momentum.
In my earlier column, I suggested to first consider breaking the long noun form in such problematic sentences into what’s called a
discontinuous phrase. The problematic sentence I presented as a case in point had a 14-word noun phrase as subject: “A report without attribution that the high-flying finance company was about the declare bankruptcy
reached the newsroom.”
To allow the operative verb phrase “reached the newsroom” to be introduced earlier, I broke that long noun phrase into this discontinuous noun phrase: “a report without attribution…that the high-flying finance company was about the declare bankruptcy.” I then inserted the operative verb phrase in-between as follows: “A report without attribution
reached the newsroom that the high-flying finance company was about the declare bankruptcy.”
Admittedly, that sentence with a discontinuous noun phrase has a little rough edge to it, but it does read and sound better—and much more comprehensible—than the original sentence that allowed the long noun phrase to run its full course before making the operative verb phrase to do its job.
Surajit’s discontinuous-phrase rewrite of his problematic sentence doesn’t do as well: “
Isolated instances have been reported
of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations.” It is confusing and it sounds bad because the long noun phrase got disjointed semantically when it was turned into a discontinuous phrase.
There’s actually a much better option to improve that sentence without using the discontinuous noun phrase, and it’s to use the much-maligned
expletive “there” reconstruction: “
There have been reports of isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations.” I think this is semantically and structurally superior to the discontinuous-phrase option, but expect many grammarians to frown on it on the ground—a tenuous ground, I must say—that using the expletive “there” weakens the action of the operative verb.
So that leaves us only one other alternative:
using the active voice for such problematic sentences. It’s the best option really, but it will require the sentence to specify the doer of the action. Assuming that it’s the ANC (the ABS-CBN news channel), we can do the following straightforward construction: “
The ANC has reported isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations.”
That sentence looks good and reads very well indeed—strong proof that putting sentences in the active voice is the best option for dealing with problems with long noun forms.
(Next:
‘Plain’ and ‘simple’ as shades of meaning) December 20, 2018
This essay, 1,122nd of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the December 13, 2018 print edition of The Manila Times
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