Take a look at this grammar-perfect yet utterly disorienting sentence that I first presented to readers of this column in 2012 and again in 2017: “The time for our two companies to consolidate resources against our increasingly tough foreign competition has come.”
The big problem with that sentence is, of course, that it has as its subject this long, complicated 15-word phrase: “the time for our two companies to consolidate resources against our increasingly tough foreign competition.” The noun form “the time” is its nominal subject but it is so distantly separated from the predicate “has come,” making the semantic relationship between subject and predicate too difficult to connect and comprehend.
Our choice in situations like this is either to put up with the tough sentence construction or to simplify it to make it easier for readers to understand what’s being said. The simplest fix I know that doesn’t require total sentence restructuring is to use the so-called
expletive “it” as the subject: “
It is now time for our two companies to consolidate resources against our increasingly tough foreign competition.”
The expletive “it” used in the sentence above isn’t the exclamatory obscene or profane word or phrase that people sometimes say in moments of anger or disappointment, as in “Doggone it!” Instead, “it” is a “dummy” subject made to occupy the position of the subject (or object) of a verb in the normal English word order, with the objective of making it as close as possible to the operative verb.
If we are averse to the expletive “it” as a fix, however, we need to break the long noun phrase to allow for the operative verb’s earlier appearance to make the sentence more easily understood. A long noun phrase broken for that purpose is called a
discontinuous noun phrase, as in this reconstruction of the original tough-as-nails sentence: “The time
has come for our two companies to consolidate resources against the increasingly tough foreign competition.”
Note that the discontinuous noun phrase technique delivered the predicate “has come” right after the nominal subject “the time,” making the sentence much simpler to comprehend and to articulate.
Let’s try applying the discontinuous noun phrase technique to this other complicated sentence with an 18-word noun phrase as subject: “
Many disturbing reports concerning cellular phone thefts brazenly perpetrated in city buses in the full view of passengers have been reaching us.” We can see that the technique can do its work neatly and beautifully. Take a look and read this: “Many disturbing reports
have been reaching us concerning cellular phone thefts brazenly perpetrated in city buses in the full view of passengers.”
When confronted with long and complicated noun phrases as subject, we need to make a judgment call whether to stick with the construction as is or to use the discontinuous phrase strategy or some variant of it.
Some sentences are a toss-up. This one of moderate length obviously can stand without the discontinuous phrase treatment: “
A disturbing number of accidents involving derailments of light-transit trains have been reported recently.” However, its sense can be more easily grasped with the discontinuous phrase treatment: “A disturbing number of accidents
have been reported recently involving derailments of light-transit trains.”
Definitely, though, much longer and more complicated sentence structures call for more aggressive reconstruction beyond just the discontinuous phrase treatment. Take this pretzel of a sentence: “
The anecdote that he was once an itinerant circus barker in the provinces is often told about the accused big-time swindler.” See and hear how much more readable it becomes when the discontinuous phrase strategy is used to bring subject and predicate virtually side-by-side: “The anecdote
is often told about the accused big-time swindler that he was once an itinerant circus barker in the provinces.”
Read this column online in
The Manila Times:
How to deal with long, complicated noun phrases(Next week:
Why we shouldn’t ever stop learning English grammar) June 4, 2020
This essay, 1,196th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the May 28, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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