From it ing

Question

I tried hard to run away from it barking and chasing after me.

Q1) Is the sentence above correct English?
Q2) Is "barking and chasing after me" describing "it" ?
Q3) Even if there is a comma as in "...from it, barking..", is "barking and chasing after me" still describing "it" ?

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

fire1I tried hard to run away from it barking and chasing after me.
Q1) Is the sentence above correct English?

It's borderline correct. It's a little crudely constructed, but I suppose we might say it's not horribly incorrect. There may be speakers who actually speak like that, but I wouldn't say it's standard English.

fire1Q2) Is "barking and chasing after me" describing "it"?

Yes. It's certainly how I'd take it if it were 'the dog':

I tried hard to run away from the dog barking and chasing after me.

But we usually say enough about a thing first so that 'it' is fully known by the time we use it. That way we don't need to describe 'it' when we use that word.

You have a reduced relative clause here (which was barking and chasing ...), and those are so rarely used after a pronoun (e.g., 'it') that it sounds wrong to a native speaker's ear. We expect 'it' to refer fully to something. The presence of a defining relative clause with 'it' is therefore anomalous.

fire1Q3) Even if there is a comma as in "...from it, barking..", is "barking and chasing after me" still describing "it"?

Yes. Comma or not, it's the same idea either way.

CJ

BillJ · Answer

I tried hard to run away from it barking and chasing after me.

From a grammatical point of view, the underlined element could be an NP with the gerund-participial clause "barking and chasing ..." modifying "it", or a gerund-participial clause with "it" as subject and "barking and chasing ..." as predicate.

However, neither version sounds wholly felicitous, probably because of this grammatical ambiguity.

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