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Sun 6 Jun, 2021 01:14 pm
Hi there.
I'm struggling with the ING words in this passage from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. How do you classify the "Drifting down...", "laying on our backs..." and "looking up...", in terms of grammar?
Are we dealing with an "anticipatory it" here ("It was kind of solemn"? Maybe with absolute phrases or appositives. I'm not sure.
"It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle."
Many thanks in advance.
@Thorny Stem,
In English grammar, anticipatory "it" involves the placement of the pronoun "it" in the usual subject position of a sentence as a stand-in for the postponed subject, which appears after the verb. It is also called an extraposed subject. Anticipatory "it" tends to place the emphasis on the verb or (more commonly) on the noun phrase that follows the verb.
Hopefully that helps you.
@Thorny Stem,
Yes, yes, and yes.
Now hit the board and give me 1500.
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