Dear Linda:

The fact is that "running from the back of his skull down to the 
front, is a patch of white hair" is a metaphorical expression. Hair 
does not *run* as a *patch* *from the back of* someone's skull* down 
to the front[of the skull]* A "literal" rendering of the same 
proposition might be:

"There is a patch of white hair from the back of his skull down to 
the front[of his skull]" 

So, in this case, the use of the Present Progressive tense cannot be 
understood literally, but figuratively. Such being the case, we need 
to decide if we want to perform a strict grammatical analysis of the 
syntactic structure under discussion, or semantic-discourse analysis 
of the propositional meaning of the same structure. And if we take 
the second option things get quite complicated.

I would stay with the strict grammatical analysis of the syntactic 
structure and try to make sense of it by ordering the sentence 
components in the basic SVO English sentence structure. 


Eduard 




On Sun, 12 Mar 2006, Linda Didesidero wrote...

> 
>The problem is with the verb ‘running’ in the progressive  form. 
>With the verbs ‘running’ and ‘riding’ in the active sense, 
we can get  
>structures similar to that in question: 
>I am running home. 
>I run home all the time. 
>Running home am I. 
>The boy is riding down the street. 
>The boy rides down the street every day at 5. 
>Riding down the street is the boy. 
>*The red marks are running all down my essay. 
>The red marks run all down my essay. 
>Running all down my essay are red marks. 
>The objection (from Bruce, I think) is that you do not typically 
use  ‘running
>’ in the sense of denoting a location (not even a path) in the  
progressive 
>form.  So here are the  two possibilities that I can see: 
>1.  The most obvious is that  “running” is part of the verb (as 
Eduard 
>suggests) in the way that ‘ride’ and  ‘run’  are parts of 
the verb in  examples 
>above.  The base form in  the progressive is odd, at best, and 
unacceptable at 
>the least. 
>2. Another possibility is that ‘running’ introduces some sort of 
locative  
>phrase or idiom or complement, which is what I think the other 
contributors 
>were  suggesting. 
>The hairline runs from here to there. 
>Running from here to there is a hairline. 
>*A hairline is running from here to there. 
>Intriguing. 
>Linda DiDesidero
>
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