Please correct this sentence.

Question

At times it has been frustrating living in the shadow of Victoria to the point that you want them to have a fight.Analysis of athe above sentence:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Noun phrase=At times, itAt times=      form:Prepositional phrase      Function:adverbial phrase/pre modifierit=         form:noun phrase       Function:subjectVerb phrase=has been frustrating living in the shadow of Victoria to the point that you want them to have a fight.has been=        form:verb phrase      Function:helping verbs/auxiliary verbs/past tensefrustrating=       form:participle phrase      Function:subject complement/adjectiveliving in the shadow of Victoria=           form:gerund phrase     Function:in apposition to subject complement, 'frustrating'to the point that you want them to have a fight=           form:noun clause/that clause      Function:apposition to frustrating(frustrating)to the point=   form:prepositional phrase         function:adverb --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------How much of this is correct?Assuming I am right that 'frustrating' is the complement, I had trouble establishing if it were a gerund or participle. I think it is an adjective complement (predicate adjective), so i went with participle. I am not sure if the rest of the sentence was a compound appositive or not.If you could help fix my mistakes etc, it would be great.Thanks so much!

AlpheccaStars · Accepted Answer

Gosh Eddie, you pick the most obtuse sentences with questionable grammar. It really is not clear on who is being frustrated - the speaker or the person with whom the speaker is talking. I will guess that the one frustrated is "you".
Anyway, sometimes it helps to rephrase the sentence in order to study it in detail. For example, convert the "inverted subject" construction into a plain old ordinary subject. Leave the incidental phrases aside to start, and get to the core of the main clause....

Eddie88At times it has been frustrating living in the shadow of Victoria to the point that you want them to have a fight.

Re-write the main clause:

Living in the shadow of Victoria has been frustrating (you) to the point.....
Now it becomes fairly clear that
"Living in the shadow of Victoria" is a noun phrase that is the subject of the present perfect progressive form of the verb "frustrate"

For apposition, a noun cannot be in apposition to an adjective, only to another noun pronoun, and only if they are exactly the same grammatical function in the sentence.
So in the inverted form, with "it" as the subject, the noun phrase is a restatement of "it" ...
The relative clause "that you want them to have a fight" just modifies the noun "point".

Eddie88 · Answer

Oh, cool, thanks.

Yes, the questions are from another forum from people who are asking these questions, and if I can't answer them, I get help from you

. I love understanding this kind of stuff. I'm fine with answering punctuation questions, but you provide me with great answers for these types of questions.

I have one question from this:

It has been frustrating.

Frustrating is a verbal functioning as a noun (gerund) or participle? It seems like a participle as it is functioning as an object; however, an adjective exist here as a predicate adjective. So I decided that it is a gerund.

My question is, since a verbal is technically not a verb, does it become a verb when it is has one or more auxiliary verbs preceding it? I ask this because you wrote it like this:

Living in the shadow of Victoria has been frustrating (you) to the point.

You make it a part of the verb chain and make YOU the object...

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At times it has been frustrating living in the shadow of Victoria to the point that you want them to have a fight.

It=non referential 'it' acting as subject

has been frustrating=verb phrase (assuming the verbal is, in fact, a part of the verb phrase)

living in the shadow=present particple/noun phrase acting as the other subject

to the point=prep phrase acting as ADVERB?

that you want them to fight=relative clause

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Is this correcct?

Thanks so much for your help.

Please correct this sentence.

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