1. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    Grammar Gerund VS Participles and Past Progressive????

    Discussion in 'Word Mechanics' started by Madman, Aug 1, 2022.

    I have heard that when doing IQ tests, you come to a point where you simply do not understand anymore and that is how your IQ is measured. I think I may have come to a point in grammar that I do not understand anymore, even with generous people trying to explain it to me.

    I have been avoiding using -ing form words in my fiction writing lately because I do not know when I'm breaking the rules. I have opted to try and rewrite all my sentences to Past Tense and mostly ignoring Past Progressive. I think this will limit my writing creativity, so I am creating this thread as a final hope to maybe help myself and perhaps others in figuring out Past Progressive and Gerund vs Participles.

    So, as far as I understand, using certain -ing words such as "writing" in connection to other words make it a "helper" word and not a true verb, hence ruining the sentence?

    How will I know when this happens?

    Example that is deemed incorrect:
    "Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes."

    Correction of the above:
    "Ship cores exploded in light that would last for minutes."

    But let's say I want to keep the above text as some form of Past Progressive? Is that even possible?

    Can some knowing soul please help out with this?

    EDIT:
    Here is the full paragraph with the surrounding text:
    As I lay here looking up I can see the place beyond the heavens, the dark from where we came, it is lighting up with fire. Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes. Ab'Raxian reinforcements, roaring their last defiance. They will soon be like me.
     
    Last edited: Aug 2, 2022
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  2. Bruce Johnson

    Bruce Johnson Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    It would help to have the full context. Here's a few lines from perhaps the most famous monologue in Sci-fi cinema history:

    I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.

    This isn't the best example because it's dialogue, and dialogue doesn't always follow the regular rules of grammar, like the presence of fragments you see here.

    Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion

    is very close to

    "Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes."

    Neither are complete sentences, but in Roy Batty's speech, the fragment is the object of the phrase "I have seen THINGS you wouldn't believe", or maybe better described as a reference back to 'things'.

    But if this is what you mean, I think it would be more correct to say "Ship cores exploding in light lasting for minutes".

    But if it's just narration of what happened from say a third person perspective, I'd go with

    Ship cores exploded in light, illuminating the waters for minutes.

    But the last sentence is one of the times I get confused too, as I always forget the rule if a comma is needed if the participial phrase comes at the end of the sentence.
     
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  3. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    (1) [I saw] Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes.
    (2) [I see] Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes.


    This has a suppressed verb so is already placing a slight demand on the reader, but the problem I see with it is that it's also trying to apply two conflicting tenses to the same idea.
    Exploding - present tense in (2) but might be subject to a suppressed past-tense verb in (1). (NB: English participles' tense isn't chronological!)
    Will last - future tense

    (1) is more jarring than (2), but (2) is unusual. And when it's out-of-context I think we hear both and it confuses us more.
    I think (2) is okay if a narrator has been using present-for-past for vividness. "The city falls. I see fires starting that will haunt my nightmares."
    But I think I would then want to bring back the suppressed verb to avoid ambiguity.

    (3) [I saw] Ship cores exploding in light that would last for minutes.
    Seems better to me if the suppressed verb is past-tense. The reader then locates themselves mentally with the exploding, and expects the light to last for minutes.

    (4) [I see] Ship cores exploding in light that may last for minutes.
    If the suppressed verb is present-tense, another route might be to remove the future indicative "will" and replace with present indicative "may" which then shifts "last" into the future-possible.
    Or "can" or other modal verbs might get closer to the OP's intended idea. English writers often have to flip between the available modal verbs to see what works best.

    If the OP is seeking a general lesson (from an English-as-additional-language perspective?) I'd suggest this is some advanced stuff and to learn by talking with English speakers.
    In creative writing, there are so many exceptions (like that present-for-past) that a sufficiently detailed explanation ends up sounding like some grammar book, and the OP probably does already have a grammar book if they are using ideas like "past-progressive" that never cross actual speakers' minds.
    The language itself is somewhat amorphous and flawed, which is part of English's all-conquering versatility. E.g. "might" is the past tense of "may" but it's also its own verb.
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2022
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  4. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Right. If you change your verb to a participle, it is no longer a verb. The clause is lost. A present participle starts as a verb and the -ing turns it into something new.
    The trick is that the new creation, the present participle, can be put in a verb phrase. You just add a "being" verb before the participle.

    verb: explode
    pres. part.: exploding
    past progressive verb phrase: was/were exploding

    So your line would be: Ship cores were exploding in light . . .
    and you need to align that last phrase with it. ("Will" is causing a problem with the tenses.) There are a few ways to do it.

    Ship cores were exploding in light that would last for minutes.
    Ship cores were exploding in light that lasted for minutes.
    I see you were messing with a second participle at the end. That's fine. This time there's no issue with verb phrases. You're working with adjective/adverb phrases. The part. phrase can be used as either. Your two choices are something like this:
    1. Ship cores exploded in light, illuminating the waters for minutes. [comma]
    2. Ship cores exploded in light illuminating the waters for minutes. [no comma]
    If there's no comma then the participle phrase ("illuminating . . . minutes") is acting like an adjective. It aims itself at the closest word, "light." It's describing the light with detail.
    If there IS a comma, then the part phrase is acting like an adverb. It aims back at the previous clause (Ship cores exploded in light). It describes the nature of that clause.

    Both 1 & 2 are grammatically correct, though 2 reads strangely to me. Too stretched out, IMO. So I would have chosen 1.
     
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  5. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    I don't know all the fancy terms, and I don't know grammar nearly as well as the 2 who posted just above me, but my intuitive solution would be to expand the fragment into a sentence like this:
    • You could see ship cores exploding in light that lasted for minutes.
    Actually that sounds strange, there's something that bothers me about exploding in light and also that lasts for minutes. Both phrases feel too short and blunt.

    If I were to try to finagle it to be smoother I might try:
    • The ships' cores blossomed into scintillating displays of intense light and heat that lasted for several minutes. Or:
    • You could see the ships' cores blossom into intense displays of light and heat that lasted for several minutes.
    In my last version you could use blossoming rather than blossom, but it starts to feel strange to me again. I guess because like @Seven Crowns said blossoming is present tense and contradicts the past tense of 'You could see'.

    EDIT—For some reason I don't quite know how to explain just yet though, I feel like it needs an adjective like scintillating, or an intense, and it needs the displays of. Because somehow blossom into light sounds wrong. Light isn't a thing, but a display of light is. I don't know how to explain that better. You wouldn't say 'blossom into a light', but you could say "blossom into a display of light". And I'm not sure why, but I feel that's important.
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2022
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  6. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    If you switch that to "blossoming," it becomes an adjective. The whole giant phrase up to the end describes the cores.

    You (subj)
    could see (verb phrase)
    cores (noun object)
    blossoming . . . minutes (adjective phrase)​

    Participles want to be adjectives by default. (e.g., blossoming flowers) They're so weird though because they always seem to be an action. You can't get the original verb out of your head and they become sort of a motion used as description. You just have to look at the target to figure it out.

    IMO, the trickiest one is in this form:
    We heard the dog barking.​
    What is "barking" in this sentence? You're not going to like it, haha.

    Anyway, sometimes it's best just to leave the details alone. You don't have to understand the grammar to use a language. It's nice for untangling problems on paper, so I guess we can't avoid all of that. Mostly, we imitate structures we've already seen.
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2022
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  7. Bruce Johnson

    Bruce Johnson Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    Thanks, I was the one that suggested a second participle. For some reason, at least in the original post, the clause 'that will last for minutes' or 'that would last for minutes' just didn't sound right, it didn't seem as continuous, and seem to increase the narrative distance I think? Not sure if that's the right way to describe it.

    I guess I sort of compare it to:

    His face boiled with a fury that frightened all before him.

    vs

    His face boiled with fury, frightening all before him.

    just sounds better to me, with or without the comma.
     
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  8. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    I agree. In the end, it's all about taste. Making something grammatically stronger doesn't necessarily make it better.
     
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  9. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    Thank you all for trying to help me out. It seems like my brain still has trouble understanding, but you have brought me closer to the enlightenment I am looking for. I need to read more about the whole thing and then come back to this thread and perhaps things will fall into place eventually.

    Also want to correct a mistake I made:
    I said it was "My" correction, which it was not, but another member on this forum who helped me out. The "would" part was the only thing I added myself. Just saying this for clarity and proper recognition, will edit the main thread to account for it.

    Anyhow, thanks a lot for all the answers!
     
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  10. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    (1) His face boiled with a fury that frightened all before him.

    English doesn't like the passive voice in these constructions. And "boiled with" is already metaphorical.
    Really it's the face doing the frightening not the fury... and the fury isn't really boiling...
    And the face is irrelevant in a book where nobody can see it. So for impact we might edit down to:-

    He frightened all before him.

    And even this might be a weak use of the idiom. cf. Coriolanus Scene V "He will mow down all before him"

    He frightened them.

    And here perhaps we would return to the drawing board and try to come up with something more creative.

    ===

    (2) His face boiled with fury, frightening all before him.

    This isn't equivalent to (1) because here the participle agrees with face, not fury.
    I think this is superior because it doesn't layer the abstraction.
    But still it's an idiom and a cliche. And I suggest one's redundant: we could keep the first half and show-not-tell, or the second and tell clearly.

    I believe the mistake is to use the words to describe the face's outward physical appearance, which is non-existent and impossible in fiction - and to neglect the inward emotion of the fear, which in fiction is real. The previous example of some explosions being bright all over the place has the same issue.

    The grammar point is secondary to this. This entire type of grammar point might never arise if the emotions are shown rather than the appearances told.
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2022
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  11. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    This example is not a sentence.
     
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  12. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,
    in form and moving how express and admirable,
    in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
    a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!

    If these aren't sentences, then screw sentences - we've no need of them.
    But I think they are. In creative writing it has always been normal to omit verbs where they are obvious from the context. And in civilized languages, not this barbarian grunting .
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2022
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  13. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    No, it's a fragment, right? Or is it even that? Will try to correct the original post.
     
  14. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Yes, a fragment. It would actually be very helpful if we could see the sentences in front of it and after it to put the whole series of phrases in context.
     
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  15. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    It's from a workshop story I have here on this forum, I'm afraid that putting too much text will make the thread go into workshop territory, that is why I have opted to only use one single line of text. But I can link the workshop thread if that is alright:
    Link removed by me, see below.
    The rest of the surrounding text is in the third paragraph of the first post. I'm still editing that piece, slowly...

    And as you can read from that thread, two people have already tried to help me understand.

    Edit, here is the paragraph with the surrounding sentences:
    "As I lay here looking up I can see the place beyond the heavens, the dark from where we came, it is lighting up with fire. Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes. Ab'Raxian reinforcements, roaring their last defiance. They will soon be like me."
     
    Last edited: Aug 2, 2022
  16. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    I say it isn't, since a fragment doesn't constitute a complete grammatical sentence.
    Whereas this is a sentence with its main verb omitted.

    Ship cores [will be] exploding in light that will last for minutes. < sentence
    Will last for minutes. < fragment
     
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  17. Bruce Johnson

    Bruce Johnson Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    I think it's fine.
     
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  18. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Thanks for the link. Actually, I believe it's OK to post three sentences (or say two sentences and a frag). That's what's allowed in the thread where you post your first three sentences from a story. But I'm not sure if that's just allowed on that thread or elsewhere as well.

    I agree with Bruce, it reads much better in context, though I would recommend changing will last for minutes to lasts for minutes.
     
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  19. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    So I can bypass the rules by posting a story in fragmented sentences? :twisted::twisted::twisted:
     
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  20. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    I did not recommend that, nor would it be in any way legally binding on me if you tried any such thing. Please don't twist my words. Thank you.

    My legal team will get in touch with your legal team.
     
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  21. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    As I lay here looking up I can see the place beyond the heavens, the dark from where we came, it is lighting up with fire. Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes. Ab'Raxian reinforcements, roaring their last defiance. They will soon be like me.

    Seems to be a general issue with agreement-of-tenses. And the sentence structure is strange.
    I'd find these 4 edits to be the shortest route to meaning, but there are any number of others (which suggests to me the thoughts are originally in a different language and this is really a translation issue):-

    As I lie here looking up I can see the place beyond the heavens, the dark from where we came. It is lighting up with fire: ship cores exploding in light that lasts for minutes. Ab'Raxian reinforcements, roaring their last defiance. They will soon be like me.

    The technique of omitting verbs for pace was used intentionally, twice on the trot.
    But the exploding ship cores are continuing the previous idea, so I'd join them into the same sentence and use a colon.
    The fragment vs. sentence question then arises in the next part "[They are] Abraxian reinforcements, roaring their last defiance."
    It's trying to be a triple-idea:- lighting up>cores exploding>Abraxians, but English doesn't like this.

    Alternatively, the Abraxian reinforcements could be joined to the cores exploding, with a semicolon. But then the cores exploding would be side-by-side with the Abraxians roaring.

    Another alternative is this:-

    As I lie here looking up I can see the place beyond the heavens, the dark from where we came. It is lighting up with fire: ship cores exploding in light that lasts for minutes. Ab'Raxian reinforcements roar their last defiance. They will soon be like me.

    But that would make the Abraxians a consecutive idea, after the exploding ship cores.
    There are three possible structures presenting themselves:-

    Abraxian reinforcements qualifies the exploding cores (omitted verb)
    Abraxian roaring is side-by-side with the exploding cores and both qualify the light (semicolon)
    Abraxian reinforcements are consecutive to the exploding cores. (change roaring to roar)
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2022
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  22. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    This whole grammar thing confuses me endlessly. I suppose my only cure is to READ MORE! Read more, and more variedly.
     
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  23. Not the Territory

    Not the Territory Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    I have that feeling when it comes to lay lie lain laid.
    [​IMG]
    I usually have to stare at this chart for minutes at a time, even then I'm not usually 100% confident afterwards.
     
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  24. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    I'm writing all my works in English as the original language. I can not blame my grammatical ineptitude on translation errors, sadly.

    Though Swedish is my native language, I grew up loving the English language more.
     
  25. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    This table might be improved with a note underneath lay saying "transitive" and a bracket underneath lie saying "intransitive."
    But dialects handle it differently. "I'm laying here" is very common.
     
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