Almost a month ago, I was surprised—“intrigued” is perhaps more appropriate—when my Facebook friend Oscar Lagman asked me this very curious grammar question through the site’s messaging app: “Joe, I feel there is something wrong in this sentence: ‘May your day be filled with joy as you fill my life.’ What is the flaw? What should it be?”
IMAGE CREDIT: PSYCHOLOGYTODAY.COM I must admit that I found the subject of his inquiry, “May your day be filled with joy as you fill my life,” so slippery that almost seven hours would pass before I got it figured out. Still unsure though about how to frame the grammatical framework for my critique of that statement, I posted this brief reply:
“Yes, Oscar, there’s definitely a big flaw in that sentence construction—the missing desirable personal attribute or aspect or object and not the person who possesses it—that’s needed to establish the comparative sense of that sentence.
“It could be anything anything endearing like say, ‘your lifelong affection,’ ‘your most valued friendship,’ or perhaps ‘your abiding companionship.’
“Let’s test those three: ‘May your day be filled with joy
as your lifelong affection fills my life.’ ‘May your day be filled with joy
as your valued friendship fills my life.’ ‘May your day be filled with joy
as your abiding companionship fills my life.’”
Having munched longer over the sentence construction “May your day be filled with joy as you fill my life,” I can say now with great certainty that it’s a failed parallel sentence with two mismatched comparative causes. The first clause is, of course, “may your day be filled with joy,” a statement that’s perfectly in good order and grammatically and semantically beyond reproach. But the second clause “you fill my life” that the comparative “as” links to it is vacuous, nonsensical, and not at all parallel to the first clause.
The clause “you fill my life” malfunctions in that supposedly parallel construction because as I said in my reply to Oscar, it has no aspect or object that can logically do the “filling one’s life” action. It’s absurd to think that the subject “you” can literally or even figuratively fill the other person’s life with himself or herself. (Perhaps with love, wealth, or excitement, yes, of course!) As I suggested, that clause needs an agency—a doer of the action—to do that “filling,” like “a most valued friendship,” “an abiding companionship,” or more to the point, “a lifelong affection.”
This brings me to the general rule for parallel comparative structures. To compare two subjects or statements (whether words, phrases, or clauses), such sentences use comparative conjunctions like “as,” “the same,” “similar to” to compare similar things and then “-er than,” “more than,” and “less than” to compare dissimilar things.
Keep in mind though that in parallel structures with comparisons, the grammatical forms need to be balanced rather than identical. The same parts of speech should be used in both of the elements being compared, although they need not be in the same order.
Take a look at the following comparative sentence that’s grammatically and structurally correct but fails to achieve parallelism: “The science fiction novelist published more books in the last decade
than were published by all his fellow novelists in the genre combined.”
Now look at that comparative sentence perfectly parallel, its elements balanced rather than identical and in the same order of appearance: “In the last decade, the science fiction novelist published more books
than all his fellow novelists in the genre combined.”
Good writing is truly the goal of parallelism, which aims to make the different parts of a complex sentence match each other in structure to make the statement read more smoothly, more forcefully, and more understandably.
(Next:
A curious incident about the use of position titles) September 17, 2020
This essay, 2,010th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 10, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times
,© 2020 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this online in
The Manila Times:
“Make sure your endearment doesn’t bungle its comparative”
