Skywalker18 wrote:
1. In option A, With the patience of its customers and with its network strained to the breaking point -- The modifier 'strained to the breaking point" applies to just "with its network" or both "With the patience of its customers" and "with its network" ?
First, let's notice that, read as if it were correctly written, that list uses "with" in two different ways.
"with the patience of its customers" would ordinarily mean something along the lines of "having the patience of its customers to make use of."
"with its network strained to the breaking point" means something along the lines of "having as an attribute its network being strained to the breaking point."
Anyway, regardless of whether the sentence makes sense, by using "with" twice, the list clearly separates the two items, because we have "with x and with y." The second "with" separates "x" from what follows the second "with." So, we don't have "with x and y strained to the breaking point." We have "with x and with y strained to the breaking point."
So, "strained to the breaking point" modifies only "network" in this version.
Using a preposition twice is actually a linguistic device that often has to be used to make clear how elements of a list are to be separated. In this case, the result of using "with" twice is an illogical separation of the elements.
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2. Since we have parallel marker "AND" in the prepositional phrase that starts with "WITH", so what is the level of parallelism we want in the 2 parts separated by the conjunction "AND" ? i.e. If the first part (preceding the parallel marker) has a prepositional phrase followed by a modifier, does the second part(following the parallel marker) SHOULD also have modifier ?
Or is it okay if both the parts that follow the preposition are nouns ?
'"Parallel" does NOT mean "exactly the same." Actually, it mostly means just "logical." So, of course, one element of a list could be composed of just a noun, while another is composed of a noun and a modifier.
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- Natalie studied ballet as a child, studies pilates now, and will study cooking someday.
** Verbs in parallel can belong to different tenses.
** But the parallel parts MUST make sense with the stem that precedes those parts.
- The angry politician, frustrated by the opposition's parliamentary tactics and screaming about the other parties unconstitutional behavior, is both a hypocrite and a narcissist. -- here both frustrated and screaming are modifiers that modify the politician, but we CANNOT replace screaming by "who screamed" because 'frustrated" will not be parallel to "who screamed".
The angry politician, who was frustrated by the opposition's parliamentary tactics and who screamed about the other parties unconstitutional behavior, is both a hypocrite and a narcissist.-- But this is correct because we have 2 who phrases in parallel ?
That sentence works.
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3. In option B, With the patience of its customers and its network strained to the breaking point --- here the With prepositional phrase "With the patience" will apply to both its customers and its network?
But since With the patience of its network DOES NOT make sense, we can read as With its network strained to the breaking point?
Interesting question, and the answer is that you can indeed use logic to determine how to read a sentence. In this case the sentence works, because, since a network would not have patience, there is no meaning ambiguity. If the second element of the list were one that could have patience, the sentence might have two possible meanings, and therefore, might not work.
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