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Sage Pearce-Higgins
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by Sage Pearce-Higgins Tue Nov 21, 2017 11:16 am

That would be changing the meaning of the sentence! Think of these examples (both correct):

The present from my brother and from my sister was a good one.
The present from my brother and the present from my sister were good ones.


What can you comment?
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by LiT706 Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:37 pm

Sage Pearce-Higgins Wrote:That would be changing the meaning of the sentence! Think of these examples (both correct):

The present from my brother and from my sister was a good one.
The present from my brother and the present from my sister were good ones.


What can you comment?

Well, I think I just not completely woke up when I wrote the post.
Thanks a lot!
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by Sage Pearce-Higgins Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:55 am

:lol:
uae918
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by uae918 Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:05 pm

I'm still not sure if I follow why "transpiration from soil and from plants" is not a compound subject. I understand that we can interpret "from soil and from plants" as a long prepositional phrase modifying the singular subject "transpiration", but how can we know when should we treat it as a modifier and when should we treat it as a compound subject?

Here is a sentence from the problem set of Manhattan SC textbook Chapter 10

"Although progress is still difficult to measure, the researchers have found that the benefit of applying interdisciplinary approaches and of fostering cooperation across multiple teams and divisions outweigh any potential cost."

The solution says we should change "benefit" to "benefits". I assume it's because there are two kinds of benefits here: 1) benefit of applying interdisciplinary approaches and 2) benefit of fostering cooperation across multiple teams and divisions.

Why, in this scenario, can't we interpret this ("of... and of...") as a long prepositional modifier? are there some rules we can follow when encounter problems like this?

Thanks in advance!
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by Sage Pearce-Higgins Tue Aug 04, 2020 12:22 pm

First of all, I would pay attention to the simple meaning of the sentence. In the problem above, ask the question 'what is it that's returning the water to the atmosphere?', then you might answer 'okay, it's the transpiration, so that must be the subject'. The same goes for the example from the SC book: ask 'what is it that's outweighing the potential cost?', then you might see 'it's the benefit / benefits that's doing the outweighing.' That simple, logical approach will work in most situations.

To go into more detail, know what a preposition is (check the Foundations of Verbal). These short words, in a broad sense, show position and include 'of', 'from', 'on', 'in', etc. When we've got a preposition, we can leave out that phrase to find the subject and verb relationship. Take a look at these sentences and identify the problems:
1) The number of students are increasing.
2) The flowers from my friend is lovely.

If you leave out the 'of students' and the 'from my friend' then you can see that we've got a subject-verb singular / plural problem. That, in a more nuanced way, is what's happening with both the transpiration and benefits examples.
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by uae918 Tue Aug 04, 2020 8:36 pm

I'm not sure if I fully understand your explanation. Why can't we interpret this sentence as transpiration from soil and transpiration from plants the same way we interpret benefit from benefit of applying interdisciplinary approaches and benefit of fostering cooperation across multiple teams and divisions?
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by Sage Pearce-Higgins Sat Aug 08, 2020 6:33 am

This is a case of singular and plural nouns. Since the sentence only mentions 'transpiration' (there's no such word as 'transpirations'), we need to use a singular verb. There's no interpretation going on here, simply a grammatical matching up of subject and verb.

Perhaps you're missing something in the example sentence about the benefits. The problem with the initial sentence is that it read '...the benefit...outweigh...'. That's a subject-verb mismatch (the same problem as writing 'it are big'). In that example, you could solve the problem by writing either 'the benefit outweighs' or 'the benefits outweigh'. Grammatically either is fine, but the second one is slightly more logical in that context.
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by uae918 Sat Aug 08, 2020 9:49 am

Thanks Sage!
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Re: THcontinental United States receives an average of 30 inches

by Sage Pearce-Higgins Mon Aug 10, 2020 6:36 am

You're welcome.