Hi everyone, I have a sentence structurally similar to the following one; 1) Ices melted "due to global warming" at the locations where temperature increased more than regular 2) Ices melted at the locations where temperature increased more than regular "due to global warming" This point is important for me that I want "due to global warming" to define the first part (Ices melted), not the other part. However, when I put "due to global warming" in the middle of the sentence as it is in (1), it sounds weird to me. I am not sure it is weird, please let me know if it is not. When I put it at the the end, it does not give me the same sentence I want. Which one is structurally correct? 1) or 2) depending on what I want. Thanks in advance
Try this: "Because of global warming, ice melted at locations..." Note that "because of" and "due to" modify different parts of speech. "Because of" modifies verbs; "due to" modifies nouns or pronouns. Because you want to modify "melted" in your example, you would use the phrase "because of."
Just as an FYI, ice is a collective noun. It would not be made into the plural form ices, unless one were specifying different kinds of ice. The reason your first example sounds strange is because it has a strong intonation of being a noun phrase divorced in syntax from the rest of the sentence. When you create a noun phrase like this, the verb gets subsumed into the noun phrase boundary (indicated by the parentheses), as a past participle (verb serving as adjective) and no longer serves as the actual verb in the sentence. This is where the strangeness comes into play. The only other verb in the sentence, increased, is subordinated into a propositional clause; thus, it also cannot serve as the main verb in the sentence. One is left with a sentence that makes little sense and where it is difficult to know what modifies what. There is no actual verb and the subject and object are opaque.
Hee hee. The diagramming of sentence structure is something I have to do on a regular basis in my line of work. Latinos writing in their mother tongue are fond of paragraph-long sentences that are either completely in the passive voice, thus no grammatical subject, or where the grammatical subject comes only toward the tail end of a ponderous preamble of convoluted and nested modifying clauses. All of this I must then make answer to the very different peculiarities of English, a language that disdains the passive and is intolerant of a grammatical subject that does not head the sentence.
