ehsanpolymechanic wrote:
Hi,
I have a question about making the verbs parallel with modifiers. Let me ask with an example:
I saw a car taken by the truck and had just three wheels left.
I saw a car that was taken by the truck and had just three wheel left.
I know that second question is actually shortened version of first one but:
1- It seems that in the first sentence "had "as a verb and "taken" as a modifier cannot be used as parallel.
2- It seems that in the second sentence "had" and "was" can be correctly considered parallel (even though it is preferable to use that before had too)
Now the question is which (or if any) of these sentences correct?
Dear
ehsanpolymechanic,
I'm happy to help.
The short answer is that first sentence is completely wrong, because of the parallelism error you identified, and the second sentence is 100% correct.
By itself, the word "
taken" is a past participle. This is a noun modifier and can begin a noun-modifying phrase, a
participial phrase. As I believe you understand, a participle can never be in parallel to a full verb.
When we add the correct
auxiliary verbs, such as
was taken
has taken
had taken
had been takenthen we create a full verb. This is no longer a noun modifier at all. This is a full verb, to be used only as a verb is used, and it can be in parallel with any other full verb.
Does all this make sense?
Mike