quote:
Originally posted by Cracovian
quote:
Originally posted by lamhasuas
Cracovian, your review of the excellent A Single Man just doesn’t hang together for me. Goode (having died) is being mourned, not doing the mourning. Grammatically, I can't make the review fit the film.
It's totally fine grammatically: it's a proper noun + gerund, rather than the proper noun + present participle structure that Firth mourning would have if applied to that film, i.e. the head noun is mourning whereas in the latter it would be Firth. It's just like ice-cream flavouring meaning the flavouring of ice cream and not that some ice cream is flavouring something else.
But no problem that you don't like it.
Yes. I understand that. But it doesn’t mean that you can legitimately use that construction with any & every gerund in English. No doubt I should have referred to usage rather than grammar. And I grant that some poetic licence applies to reviews. But: after the death of a friend, as it might be, friend mourning has never yet occurred.
The reason I brought this up is that this same review occurred to me after I saw the movie but I decided not to submit it, for the above reason & because its apparent meaning — that Goode is mourning — is so different from its actual meaning.
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Seán's FYCTH - #664
Posted - 11/25/2010 : 13:57:44
