Three vague sentences plus one question in the question itself

Question

1.Somehow this sort of traditional Hamlet aspect in the untraditional character he was playing didn't seem to fit together.2.The people who want to play with the cards that have goods trains on have to sit here.What do the itallicized parts mean? They seem vague to a foreigner like me.3.That teapot the duke has given to my aunt.Anyway, is it a sentence?The context(s) of the three is(are) not given where they are adpated.Should it(they) be context/contexts, is/are in the sentence above?Thanks in advance.

BarbaraPA · Accepted Answer

Hi ecopsy,

1. This would work in the right context - describing a performance in the theater, for example.

2. This doesn't make sense - good trains on THEM could work if there were, for example, playing cards with different designs on their backs, among which was a deck of cards with pictures of "good trains." It would be a very unusual situation for this to make sense. What makes a good train? However, wtih the addition of "them" it's grammaticaly, if puzzling in meaning.

3. This is a noun phrase, and it could work as a stand-alone thing to say if you have just been asked "Which teapot do you mean?"

The contexts of the three sentences were not provided.(I chose plural because these seem to be utterly unrelated, and therefore each would have a differen context.)

AlpheccaStars · Answer

ecopsy1.Somehow this sort of traditional Hamlet aspect in the untraditional character he was playing didn't seem to fit together.
2.The people who want to play with the cards that have goods trains on have to sit here.

1) It is a very obtuse sentence. The reference "together" mentions only one thing - a feature in the character "Hamlet". Together always means two or more things

(Hamlet is the protagonist in Shakespeare's play of the same name. He is a young prince who is visited by his late father's ghost. The ghost told that his brother murdered him, took his throne, and married his wife. The rest of the play concerns Hamlet's struggle with avenging his father.)

2) A "goods train" is a train that carries freight - logs, cattle, bulk grain, chemicals, etc. These playing cards have pictures of such trains on one side.

ecopsy3.That teapot the duke has given to my aunt.

It is a sentence, but sounds like a fragment by the use of "that" as a demonstrative pronoun, and the position of the direct object at the beginning of the sentence.
The better wording is:

That is the teapot that the duke...

I don't understand your last question. These sentences do not seem to be related at all to each other.

All the best
A-

s

BarbaraPA · Answer

Oh! I never saw that "S" in "goods train" - I thought it was a "good train" compared to a "bad train," I guess.

Thanks.

Ecopsy · Answer

All the three sentences are from Halliday's 'An Introduction to Functional Grammar' for which he didn't provide any context.

I'd check the first sentence again to make sure I haven't spoiled it by typing errors.

Your interprataion of the second sentence makes sense.

And I didn't think the third is a sentence, and I'd hold to that after your explanation.

For the last one, apparently that is a pseudo-problem for you native speakers. But as there is no plural forms at all in Chinese, I'd think it over and make two forms find their right position.

Thanks for your time.

Ecopsy · Answer

Thank you, Grammar Geek, really appreciate your help.

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Three vague sentences plus one question in the question itself

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