The key word here is “visiting.” Is it used as a verb, or as an adjective?
If “visiting” is used as a verb in combination with the helping verb “are,” then this use is considered a progressive aspect of its form. The action is in progress. The visiting is going on right now. “They” refers to a group of people. This group happens to be in the process of visiting its relatives, somewhere. The implication is that at least a bit of traveling was involved in reaching the destination where these relatives live.
If “visiting” is used as an adjective, then it modifies the plural noun “relatives.” Now the main action switches to the other group mentioned in the sentence. “They” is a pronoun referring to the “visiting relatives.” The word “are” merely indicates a state of being. The sentence describes who these people are. They happen to be relatives who are visiting someone’s home. For how long, we don’t know.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
The following sentence is ambiguous. Provide two explanations which illustrate the different meaning of the sentence. "They are visiting relatives."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment