sislam04 wrote:
I was asking specifically about the parallelism how come in terms of parallelism how come "to prohibit" and "to forbid" are parallel but "forming" and "advertise" don't have to be parallel? I understand the idiomatic portion
Dear
sislam04,
I'm happy to respond to your question.
I see that
sayantanc2k replied, but I want to take a slightly broader view.
Students have a few typical misconceptions about parallelism. Fundamentally, students conceive of parallelism primarily as a grammatical structure. It is not. Parallelism is primarily a logical structure, and the matching grammar merely mirrors the underlying logic. Following this misconception, students mistakenly believe that parallelism means that the two branches have to be lockstep precision, matching down to the last detail. That's absurd. There only has to be enough grammatical matching to make the logical pattern clear.
Here's the OA of the question that I wrote:
The FDA enacted these recent restrictions both to prohibit individual physicians from forming financial partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and to forbid the companies to advertise directly to the physicians.
How much has to match in parallelism? Only enough to make the logical pattern clear. The FDA had two purposes in enacting these restrictions, to prohibit something and to forbid something. These are both expressed as
infinitives of purpose. Those two are in parallel, so they have to match, and they do: both are infinitives: "
both to prohibit . . . and to forbid . . . " That's the parallelism, right there, between those two infinitives. That's it.
What happens after that high level matching is 100% irrelevant to the parallelism. Once the logical pattern of matching is established, the job of parallelism has been fulfilled, and it places no more requirements on the sentence.
More importantly, within the two infinitive clauses, we have to follow the rules of idioms. The verb "
prohibit" idiomatically takes
from + [gerund]. The verb "
forbid" idiomatically takes the infinitive. When I designed this question, I specifically chose two verbs that would have two different idioms. For more help on idioms, see the free
GMAT idiom flashcards. The requirements of parallelism never never never supersede the rules of idiom.
You see, two verbs in parallel could have
different tenses, or one could be active and one passive, or one have a long modifying clause and the other not. It doesn't matter. Parallelism is not a mathematical pattern that forces every single element into a precise Procrustean pattern. Parallelism is a logical pattern, and the matching grammar need only make clear the logic, no more.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)