In keeping with her commitment to her Christian faith, Sojourner Truth

Hi Marty,
why it doesn't make sense?
emancipate means set free; and dedicated means committed!
she was committed to set free women.
nothing seems illogical to me
or its a parallelism issue but we don't usually dig deep into the parallelism that one is to+gerund and the other is to+verb; both starts with preposition "to" and thats enough to make sure that structure is parallel.
Or should I start digging in future?
or its an ideom issue dedicated to emancipate is never acceptable?

Hello dcoolguy,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, the infinitive verb form ("to + base form of verb" - "to + emancipate") is the preferred verb form for referring to the purpose or intent of an action; thus, the use of "to emancipate" incorrectly modifies the verb "dedicated", illogically implying that Sojourner Truth was dedicated for the purpose of emancipating women; the intended meaning is that Sojourner Truth was dedicated to the cause of emancipating women.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team
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Thanks for the explanation.
However, I am still not able to process this.
To+ verb not always depicts purpose.
If it does here, whats wrong with her purpose,
She was dedicated to (purpose) set free women.
May be she wants to set them free - and she is doing good for those women.

Posted from my mobile device

Hello dcoolguy,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, the issue here is the construction of the relevant phrase. To convey that someone had dedication towards a cause the correct construction is "dedicated + to + noun". Thus, in this case, "was dedicated to the emancipation" or "was dedicated to emancipating (gerund)" are appropriate; the construction used in Option D "was dedicated...to emancipate" is a passive construction that illogically implies that some other entity dedicated Soujurner in order to emancipate women.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team
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I'm a bit confused about the use of "a dedication to both...the emacipation of women" in this sentence as a whole.
Is it correct to say this phrase serves as an appositive that modifies for "a public speaker"?

"a dedication" is just an object of the verb demonstrated.
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Hey trunghieule

Happy to help!

Let's try to answer you question by deriving the Sentence Structure of the original sentence:

In keeping with her commitment to her Christian faith, Sojourner Truth demonstrated as a public speaker a dedication both to the nonviolent abolition of slavery as well as for women to be emancipated.

Sentence Structure:

• In keeping with her commitment to her Christian faith,
  
  • Sojourner Truth demonstrated
    
    • as a public speaker
    • a dedication
      
      • both
        
        • to the nonviolent abolition of slavery
      • as well as
        
        • for women to be emancipated.

Observations:

• As we can see from the sentence structure above, "a dedication" is merely the object of the verb "demonstrated".
• The phrase "as a public speaker" is merely an adverbial modifier of the verb "demonstrated". How did she "demonstrate a dedication"? - as a public speaker.
• Being able to see the sentence this way also makes it easy to identify the error of the correlative conjunction: "both - and". "As well as" is incorrect.
• It also enables us to spot the idiomatic error "for" instead of "to" after the noun "dedication".

I hope this helps not only answer your question but also realize the importance of Structural Analysis of long sentences.

Happy Learning!

Abhishek
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Thank you in advance! This is really insightful.

ExpertsGlobal5 what do you mean? whats the difference b/w for the purpose of and to the cause of?

Hi AjiteshArun ,

I have two questions:

1. In option B , apart from ||ism error, why 'her being dedicated' is incorrect ?
2. In option D , if we change from 'to emancipate' to 'to emancipating' , will it be considered correct? Also, if it is considered correct , then will this option be considered superior to the official answer 'C' ?

Thanks for your help!

Hi perseverance2021,

1. Her being dedicated is somewhat awkward. For example, if we had to choose between (a) "He demonstrated his being interested in SC" and (b) "He demonstrated his interest in SC", we'd normally choose (b), the one with the noun interest, over (a), the one with the gerund being. Keep in mind that this is a relatively less reliable call, and that in some (other, different) cases, we may prefer gerunds over nouns.

2. It's hard to say. For what it's worth, I don't think the GMAT would want to force test takers to take that call.
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Hi AjiteshArun,

Noted that ''dedicated to'' should take noun or gerund, but ''to emancipate'' shows the intent of the verb ''dedicated, right?
It is wrong to use infinitive just because verb should take object not another verb?

Also in (B) Can we say that the nonviolent abolishing and women’s emancipation is parallel?

Thanks

Hi ashutosh_73,

1. To can be (a) a preposition or (b) an infinitive marker (it can also be an adverb, but we don't need to worry about that). A preposition takes either a noun or a gerund as its object, whereas to as an infinitive marker is followed by the plain form of a verb. The important thing to note here is that the to we see after dedicated is a preposition. This is why we don't use the plain form of a verb after to here. This to is not an infinitive marker.

2. We can make gerunds parallel to nouns, but this depends to a large extent on context. That is, we will need to think about the specific words we're looking at.

3. It seems you tried to take a call on to based on meaning. I'm not saying meaning is not important, but a lot of the information out there about meaning is just plain wrong. Meaning is not special, and it's not more important than everything else in SC. More directly, no matter how good an unidiomatic structure is at communicating the meaning that we want, it will never be correct. Here's one way to look at meaning:


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