24. Loose or detached parts of the sentence.

The term “loose” is used in English grammars chiefly with reference to the apposition: close apposition and loose apposition are two notions opposed to each other in grammatical theory. Another term which may be used is “detached”: detached attributes, detached adverbial modifiers and so on. By loose parts of the sentence we mean such parts as are less intimately connected with the rest of the sentence and have some sort of independence, which finds its expression in intonation, writing, and punctuation. The main parts, subject and predicate, cannot be loose as they form the backbone of the sentence from which other parts may be “detached”. Objects cannot apparently be loose either.

Loose attributes may be expressed by the same kind of words and phrases as the usual attributes. Their peculiarity is that they are separated from their headword by a pause, by an intonation of their own, and by a punctuation mark in writing. Loose attributes have a somewhat larger sphere of application than ordinary ones: whereas a personal pronoun can hardly ever be a head word for an ordinary attribute, it can be one for a loose attribute: e.g. Living or dead, she could not fail him, no matter what he cost. The semantic connections between the loose attribute and the rest part of the sentence are different in the two cases, but this depends entirely on the lexical meaning of the words involved. It is especially the conjunction or that gives the connection a concessive tinge (living or dead=whether he was living or dead, no matter whether he was living or dead).

Loose adverbial modifiers are perhaps more frequent even than loose attr. This is esp. True of those adv. Mod.which do not modify any particular part of the sent. but refer to the sent. as a whole. They are often found at the beginning of the sentence and they point out the place, time or the general conditions in which the action takes place. E.g.Their men might be dying, even now, on the sunparched grass of the Pennsylvania hiils. From such loose adv mod, which tend to be rather separated from the rest of the sent, we can step by step arrive at parentheses and insertions.

Loose appositions. The difference between the type of apposition found in a sent likeA for Uncle Peter, he took it for grante that Scarlett had come to stay.The ordinary apposition makes a whole with its head word, it can’t be separated from it either in oral speech or in a written text whereas a loose apposition is separated from its head word by these means.Loose appos. can contain various kinds of information about the person or thing denoted by the head word.

25. The subject. Its definition. The formal subject.

In trying to give a definition of the subject, we shall have to include in it both general points, valid for language in general, and specific points connected with the structure of Modern English. Thus the defenition of the subject in Modern English will only partly, not wholly, coincide with its defenition in Russian. It is bound to contain the following items:1- the meaning of the subject, that is its relation to the though expressed in the sentence, 2-its syntactical relations in the sentence, 3-its morphological realization.

The definition of the subject would be smth like this. The subject is one of the two main parts of the sentence. It denotes the thing whose action or characteristic is expressed by the predicate. It is not dependent on any other part of the sentence. It may be expressed by different parts of speech, the most frequent ones being: a noun in the common case, a personal pronoun in the nominative case, a demonstrative pronoun ocassionally, a substantivized adjective, a numeral, an infinitive, and a gerund. It may also be expressed by a phrase.

In discussing problems of the subject, we must mention the argument that has been going on for some time about sentences of the following type:It gave Hermione a sudden convulsive sensation of pleasure, to see these rich colours under the candlelight. On the one hand, the pronoun it at the begining of the sentence is the formal subject, and the real subject is the infinitive in this particular case to see.On the other hand, it is the subject of the sentence, and the infinitivean opposition to it. There is smth to be said on both sides of the question. On the whole, however, the second point of view seems preferable, as the devision of subjects into formal and real ones seems hard to justify in general syntactical theory. As we have seen, the definition of the sublect given here includes mention of the predicate. This is in accordance with the view stated above, that the two notions are correlative, that is to say, there is a subject in two-member sentences only.In a similar way, a difinition of the predicate will have to include mention of the subject.