Herb,
By intonational marking, do you mean as signalled by punctuation? It
seems to me that sentence modifiers show up somewhat parenthetically in
a number of slots. (Somewhat flexible). These might occasionally
require rephrasing to guard against ambiguity.>
I wouldn't make that claim, seriously.
I wouldn't vote, to be honest, for anything like that.
I wouldn't, to be honest, even consider voting for Bush.
I wouldn't even consider, as I'm sure you know, voting for that silly
proposal.
Perhaps there are overlapping systems for qualifying the nature
(intentionality) of statements, the assessed likelihood of something being
desirable or true, or the nature of the knowledge base or the perspective
("seems", "appears", "certainly", "might", "possibly", and so on), and
some of these functions shade very subtly into the verb phrase and out
again.
Certainly, she will be there.
She will certainly be there.
Possibly, she will be there.
She may be there.
She may possibly be there.
At any point, do we want to think of these as sentence modifiers?
Here there seems to me less need for intonation marking.
Craig
Paul,
>
>
>
> How would you test for the distinction between sentence modifier and VP
> modifier? The best I can come up with is that, unless special
> intonational marking is included, sentence modifiers must precede the
> sentence, as in
>
>
>
> Seriously, I wouldn't make that claim.
>
> Vs.
>
> I wouldn't seriously make that claim.
>
> Or
>
> I wouldn't make that claim seriously.
>
>
>
> In the latter two, "seriously" modifies "make", but in the first, it's
> more like "Take my assertion seriously" or "I'm serious when I say that
> ..."
>
>
>
> I don't find "for me" behaving that way. It doesn't have different
> scope and meaning when it comes at the beginning.
>
> If you can show that it does, then it could probably be a sentence
> modifier.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
>
>
> Isn't it modifying the whole sentence?
>
>
>
> Paul D.
>
> crg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Michael, thank you!
>
> I go with modifying the verb.
>
> Christine
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kischner, Michael
> Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 6:25 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: This is difficult for me
>
> So sorry I did not proofread my question before sending it. Even
> though
> some people figured it out and have sent answers, here it is
> again, as it
> should have been written:
>
> Another quick parsing question: In "This is difficult for me,"
> is
> the prepositional phrase "for me" modifying the verb "is" or the
> adjective
> "difficult"?
>
>
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