Is This Ain't No Good Grammar?

Lyxdeslic

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Obviously the title isn't. ;)

Question is, will the following sentence fly:



His green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.



Thanks in advance,

Lyx

PS

Since I'm here, stone in hand, may I kill two birds? Yes? Awesome. In the following sentence, should it be "has" or "have?"

“What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?”

Thanks again, you rockin' AW geniuses.
 
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Chase

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I'll take a couple of shots, even though isolated sentences are like shooting in the dark:


His green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.


Even if "his green" is a suit of clothing or an aura, the sentence is confusing without context. The more traditional line might be Green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.

“What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?”

"What ideas have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?"

Above, have takes its spelling from plural ideas. If idea, singular, then "What idea has that brilliant brain of yours conjured?"
 

Deleted member 42

I suspect that the "his" is part of a sort of nominal zeugma; that is, David's eyes are green with envy of the blue-rimmed eyes of the lemonpeel angelfish.
 

Chase

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I suspect that the "his" is part of a sort of nominal zeugma; that is, David's eyes are green with envy of the blue-rimmed eyes of the lemonpeel angelfish.

I see the reading through your eyes, Lisa (sorry). It makes sense, a shortened form of "His own eyes green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish" where "eyes" isn't echoed.

Thanks. What she said, Lyxdeslic.
 

moth

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In the following sentence, should it be "has" or "have?"

“What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?"
I think it should be "what ideas has that brilliant brain of yours conjured" -- because the brain is what's doing the conjuring.

"[your] brain has conjured" is what the sentence boils down to. The ideas did no conjuring, so the verb form shouldn't come from the word ideas.

Rephrased, "That brilliant brain of yours has conjured what ideas?"

Not sure about the first question you asked though, Lyx.
 

Chase

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Have and has as transitive verbs from Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary:

a: to hold or maintain as a possession, privilege, or entitlement "They have a new car," "I have my rights."

c : to hold, include, or contain as a part or whole "The car has power brakes," "April has 30 days."

In each case, the plural or singular subject determined have or has, not the object.
 

mirandashell

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I'm afraid my reaction to the first sentence was to assume a missing word. As in 'His what?'
 

moth

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In each case, the plural or singular subject determined have or has, not the object.
Which is why I said I think it should be has, since the singular brain (subject) is what has conjured the ideas (object). Brain has conjured.
 

Kayley

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I think it should be "what ideas has that brilliant brain of yours conjured" -- because the brain is what's doing the conjuring.

"[your] brain has conjured" is what the sentence boils down to. The ideas did no conjuring, so the verb form shouldn't come from the word ideas.

Rephrased, "That brilliant brain of yours has conjured what ideas?"

Not sure about the first question you asked though, Lyx.

I agree. "Brain" is the subject. Since it's a singular word, the sentence should include "has", not "have".

I'm afraid my reaction to the first sentence was to assume a missing word. As in 'His what?'

I agree with this too. I'm still not quite sure what the sentence is trying to say...
 

Deleted member 42

“What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?”

Here's a hint. Find the verb and the subject, and don't be confused by the object.

Also? These remind me of the parsing examples I used back in the day to try to teach software to label parts of speech and then diagram them.

These are both fairly common kinds of examples used in linguistics classes to explore the many oddities of English.
 
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Devil Ledbetter

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Obviously the title isn't. ;)

Question is, will the following sentence fly:



His green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.



Thanks in advance,

Lyx

PS

Since I'm here, stone in hand, may I kill two birds? Yes? Awesome. In the following sentence, should it be "has" or "have?"

“What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?”

Thanks again, you rockin' AW geniuses.
Brain has conjured ideas. Ideas have been conjured by brain. But ideas has is pretty awkward so I'd reword that.

As for the blue-rimmed eyes, I dislike sentence that until you get to the end don't quite any sense make. But about me that is something which you already understood. Yoda.
 

BethS

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What ideas has...

If you're unsure, flip it around: That brilliant brain of yours has conjured...

As to your other sentence, is there a word missing? "His green with envy" makes no sense.
 

fireluxlou

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'His green with envy,' throws me out of the loop.

His eyes, green with envy?
 

F.E.

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Obviously the title isn't.

Question is, will the following sentence fly:
His green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
Thanks in advance,
Lyx

PS
Since I'm here, stone in hand, may I kill two birds? Yes? Awesome. In the following sentence, should it be "has" or "have?"
“What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?”
Thanks again, you rockin' AW geniuses.
For that second question, perhaps consider:
  • What ideas has that brilliant brain of yours conjured up?
.
As to your 1st question, that one seems to be rather interesting, imo. :)
 

Chase

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Not beating a dead horse here, but more like a horse being led to water it doesn't want to drink.

I'm absolutely sure brain isn't the subject of the original sentence: “What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?" And flipping a sentence around can change the grammar, so that isn't helpful.

Is the hint I'm not seeing for my choice the fact that What is the subject?
 

absitinvidia

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The first sentence will not fly because your pronoun "his" refers, as written, to "green with envy." This makes no sense at all.
 

absitinvidia

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Not beating a dead horse here, but more like a horse being led to water it doesn't want to drink.

I'm absolutely sure brain isn't the subject of the original sentence: “What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?" And flipping a sentence around can change the grammar, so that isn't helpful.

Is the hint I'm not seeing for my choice the fact that What is the subject?

"Brain" is indeed the subject of the sentence. "What" cannot be the subject as it is modifying "ideas." "Ideas" is not the subject because the verb is active (has conjured) and not passive (have been conjured)--meaning the subject must be the thing doing the conjuring (i.e., the brain) and not the thing that was conjured (i.e., the ideas).

For "What ideas" to be the subject, you'd have to rewrite the sentence:

What ideas have been conjured by that brilliant brain of yours?
 

Chase

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Ah, thanks. I think it may seep in. I hate mixing metaphors, but this was a case of leading a horse to water, then taking a village to waterboard it.
 

Deleted member 42

There's a concept linguists use that I wish I'd heard of when I was a teen.

It's called linguistic typology. It means classing languages in groups based on the most common syntax patterns in a language.

English is, usually, a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) language. That means a sentence usually has the subject first (where subject means the person/thing doing the action of the verb, followed by the verb, and then object.

Other languages have Verb-Subject-Object; all the Celtic languages are like that.

Latin is Subject-Object-Verb; so are lots of the Romance languages descended from Latin.

There are many other options, including languages which lack Subjects and Objects but have only Agents and Verbs.

And as I suspect Chase knows, there a sign languages that offer other variations as well.

The thing is, because English has both syntax order, and declensions, you can screw with English syntax or word order, and still make sense. That second sentence is screwing with English's standard SVO order.

As I've said before, English is a right bitch, but I love her. Like cockroaches, English will adapt and survive.
 

Deleted member 42

Not beating a dead horse here, but more like a horse being led to water it doesn't want to drink.

I'm absolutely sure brain isn't the subject of the original sentence: “What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured?" And flipping a sentence around can change the grammar, so that isn't helpful.

Is the hint I'm not seeing for my choice the fact that What is the subject?

Look for the verb in English (or in German). Then ask: What conjugation is that verb? What number?

Has conjured is the verb.

Who/what does/did the conjuring?

That brilliant brain of yours did the conjuring. So that brilliant brain of yours is the subject, but the syntax is non-standard. The object is presented before the subject, which you can get away with in English, because, well, we duplicate data by indicating the same things with word order and suffixes.

What ideas is the object. It is, for the obsessive and technically inclined weirdos, a direct object.
 
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F.E.

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The OP's first question might rely a bit on its surrounding context. His first example:
OP's example #1: His green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
Suppose it was in a context such as:
His sister's eyes are red with anger. His green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
.
One problem might be due to the possible ambiguity with the phrase:
His green with envy,
as it could cause problems to a reader.

If we just look at the info -- His sister's eyes are red with anger. His green with envy, -- then the writer might be able to force the interpretation he wanted by using punctuation:
His sister's eyes are red with anger. His, green with envy.
or
His sister's eyes are red with anger; his, green with envy.
which still isn't really that good. ... But that type of solution probably isn't available for the original example due to the structure of the original example, where a comma is already used to separate the leading adjunct "His green with envy" from the main clause of the sentence. For some bad possies:
His, green with envy, David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
His, green with envy; David stares into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
.
Involved in that original example might be the issues of: 1. fused head; and 2. ambiguity in personal pronoun forms. (And also the possibility of the author intending to use zeugma, where he's trying to get that one troublesome phrase to have two different meanings at the same time. Maybe.)

Now suppose I took my example and switched it into 1st person:
A. My sister's eyes are red with anger. Mine green with envy, I stare into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
B. My sister's eyes are red with anger. My eyes green with envy, I stare into the blue-rimmed eyes of a lemonpeel angelfish.
Those two 1st person examples seem to be okay (imo). The main difference between the #A and #B examples is that #A uses the independent genitive form "mine", while #B uses the dependent genitive form "my".

But unfortunately, the masculine personal pronoun HE has the same shape "his" for both its independent and dependent genitive forms. That ambiguity probably helps in confusing the reader. Besides that, some readers might be seeing a possibility of interpreting the "his" in the original example as a possible fused head: for a fused determiner-head "his" that has the semantic meaning of "his eyes".

So, I kinda thought that original example (the OP's first example) to be kinda interesting due to all the issues that it sorta touched upon. :)
 
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F.E.

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Let's look a bit at the OP's second question. :)

OP's example #2: “What ideas has/have that brilliant brain of yours conjured up?"
Interrogative clauses can sometimes be a bit tricky in parsing. One technique that often helps in parsing an interrogative clause is to find or create an approximate or similar declarative clause. And sometimes, it is easier to use a textually different clause, but one that is similar in structure to the original, to assist in the analyzing.

The original example is an interrogative clause; that is, a non-canonical clause:
1. OP's example: What ideas has that brilliant brain of yours conjured up?
Another clause that has a similar structure, but has a simpler subject of "Tom":
1.b. What ideas has Tom conjured up?
I've replaced a singular noun phrase of the original example with the new phrase of "Tom" which is also a singular noun phrase.

Another clause that has a similar structure, which I'll be using more of:
2. What option has Tom chosen?
(Edited-to-add: Supposedly "conjured up" is transitive, so I am now using the transitive "chosen" instead of the previous attempt with the intransitive sense of "decided [on]". Sorta guessing that the "up" in "conjured up" is a particle, due to "I conjured up a spirit" and "I conjured it up" and the ungrammatical "I conjured up it".)

That similar clause when converted to a corresponding declarative clause:
3. declarative clause: Tom has chosen an option.
Converting that declarative clause back into an interrogative clause by "subject auxiliary [verb] inversion":
4. subject-auxiliary inversion: Has Tom chosen an option?
Then, front the "semantic object" -- which in this case involves tweaking that phrase "an option" into "what/which option":
5. fronting: What option has Tom chosen?
And from the above lengthy set of steps, we see that #5 is an interrogative clause that could be associated with the declarative clause #3:
3. declarative clause: Tom has chosen an option.
5. fronting--interrogative: What option has Tom chosen?
To see what syntactic functions that the various phrases within the interrogative clause (#5) are performing, it is often easier to analyze a similar/corresponding declarative clause (#3).

In this case, the verb "has" is functioning as the auxiliary verb in all the examples. And in the declarative clause example, its subject is singular, and so, the auxiliary verb is singular too -- "has" (instead of "have").

I don't think I made too many significant mistakes in this post. Then again, ... :)
 
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Jamesaritchie

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"His green with envy" is just bad, whatever the context, whatever the grammar.
 

Deleted member 42

"His green with envy" is just bad, whatever the context, whatever the grammar.

Not necessarily. You don't know the context.

It might be from pretentious poetry. It might be from a non-native. It might be from an example of post modern experimental literature.

Just because it doesn't make you squee, doesn't make it bad.

I'm not a fan of Henry James; I wouldn't call him bad.
 

Lyxdeslic

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Crap, sorry, guys, got caught up in work.

Many varied opinions, facts, and thoughts brought forth here. Most certainly to my detriment, here are mine.

I'm leaving both sentences as are. The first one, though technically incorrect, complex, Yoda-esque, and my personal favorite:
"His green with envy" is just bad, whatever the context, whatever the grammar.
...is a brief infusion of style. Absolutely, I could write: His eyes green with envy, David stared into the blue-rimmed eyes...

Or, I could rework the sentence entirely. The "green with envy" bit is a cliche, I'm aware, but its drowned out by the parsing of the sentence (<--crap, JAR, a passive sentence, another one of your "bad bad bad never never never" nits). We spend so much time adhering/obeying rules. That's a good thing. Those boundaries are needed. But I gotta go with my gut here, based solely off your guys' reactions: some get it, some hate it, some are firm that it's just wrong, some enjoy the complexity. To me? It's a sentence, requiring a little bit o' thought, and the context literally drowns, imo, any book-slamming-shut potential--the man is learning to breathe, underwater. I dunno, weighing it, considering it, hopefully discarding hubris, the wonder of the sentence lends to the wonder and majestic tone of this underwater scene.

As for the other one, some say right, others wrong, a few calls for rewording. I say, ultimately, it's dialogue, doesn't require too much effort to parse out, and fits the stuffy egoist's voice.

All that considered, I thank everyone, including our self-proclaimed curmudgeon, Mr. JAR, for your thoughts, facts and opines. Love this place. Love the depths we're able to explore a single sentence--or in this case two. I mean it. Love it. We are a unique breed.

And I love that, too.

Lyx