Thursday, July 29, 2004

Prepositional Phrase

Ex: Canada is a land of freedom which has already accepted thousands of refugees In the above, what is in red is a prepositional phrase. As you can see, "which" in this case cannot refer to freedom because it is the land which "accepted thousands of refugees, not the "freedom". My point is that you have to be careful what relative pronouns refer to, it does not have to be the immediately preceding pronoun although if often times is.

I just want to bring up another example to show you the confusion prepositional phrases can create:
Ex: The manager of the investment division stood against the door. In the above, who "stood" against the door? It is without any doubt "the manager". This example is just to show to you that the prepositional phrase, in this case, is just extra information and does not have any impact on the indepedent sentence structure(bolded portion).

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