Строй современного английского языка
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| parties.. . trips. It comes after parties and makes it clear how frequent the parties were. It would hardly be possible here to add the conjunction for in front of the inserted clause: that would make the statement too exact and introduce an element of superfluous accuracy which is out of place here.
It must be owned, however, that the boundary line between inserted clauses remaining, as it were, outside the structure of the sentence proper, and clauses making part of that structure, is not always easy to draw; in certain cases it may depend on the grammarian's view, that is, it may be to some extent arbitrary. We may, then, either leave the question open, or decide in advance that doubtful cases of this kind will be judged in a definite way, for instance, that we will consider such doubtful sentences to be inserted. DIFFERENT TYPES OF MIXED SENTENCES It would be vain to expect that every sentence we can meet with in a text is bound to be either syndetic or asyndetic, either compound or complex, etc. Several or indeed all of these characteristics may be found in a sentence at the same time. It may, for instance, consist of several clauses, some of them connected with each other syndetically, i. e. by conjunctions or connective words, while others are connected asyndetically, i. e. without any such words; it is also possible that some of the clauses are co-ordinated with each other, so that a certain part of the whole sentence is compound, while others are subordinate, so that another part of the whole sentence is complex, etc. The amount of variations is here probably bound- Different Types of Mixed Sentences 327 l ess, though to assert this with any degree of certainty a detailed study of a great number of texts would have to be made. It would serve no useful purpose to invent special terms for every possible variety of sentence that might be found. It will perhaps be best to term them "mixed sentences". Here is an example of a mixed sentence showing simultaneously several of the syntactical peculiarities which we have so far studied separately: Barbary did not tell Mavis where she had stored the things; the sly secrecy of the maquis rose in her; she said she had hidden them somewhere safe. (R. MACAULAY) |