A dedicated congressman he is, he rejected all offers…. (The Times of India, Feb. 8, 1998, p.5)
You might wonder why I have dug out this ancient specimen from my files. The date doesn’t really matter. Its only purpose is to show that the sentence taken up for discussion is an authentic one; not cooked up to fill this column.
The structure, as given, is faulty. It should be either: A dedicated congressman, he has rejected all offers…Or The dedicated congressman that he is, he has rejected all offers…
Obviously, there are two ideas which the writer wants to express. In their simplest form we may state them like this. He is a dedicated congressman. He has rejected all offers….One way of combining these two statements would be He is a dedicated congressman and he has rejected all offers…. But this way of putting it does not bring out any necessary connection between the two statements. A compact way of expressing these ideas would be: Being a dedicated congressman, he has rejected all offers…. (1) This establishes a connection between the two clauses. That he rejected all offers follows from his being a dedicated congressman. We can omit being and then we get A dedicated congressman, he has rejected all offers….(2)
If you now look at the two sentences we started with you can see that what the writer has done is to prepose a dedicated congressman without making any further changes. You then get A dedicated congressman he is, he has rejected all offers…. A dedicated congressman he is, is not by itself ungrammatical. It is ungainly and sounds odd. But here as the first part of a larger structure it is ungrammatical. The first part of the sentence is intended to express a connection with the second part. But the structure nodded to express the intended meaning is different. You will have to say: The dedicated congressman that he is, he has rejected ….Why? The structure he is is now connected to congressman by being turned into a relative clause.
That is the relative pronoun; its antecedent is the dedicated congressman. The idea, implicit in the writer’s sentence that his dedication to congress is well known is captured by using the definite article. (Cf. the tennis champion that Federer is/ the philanthropist that Bill Gates is/ the war monger that Bush is, etc.) It is because of this meaning of ‘being well known’ that we cannot say A dedicated congressman that he is (or A philanthropist that Bill Gates is). The reader is assumed to know that the person is a dedicated congressman. So we have to use the definite article.
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Road width
A language has a vocabulary to express what has been conceptualised as an entity. At the most concrete level we have words like table, chair, book, etc. At the other end we have names for ideas, hopes, fears, etc.; anxiety, democracy, victory, etc.
What thoughts get conceptualised as words and what remain without that distinction — this is a topic on which a chapter, if not a monograph, can be written. Anyway it is quite clear that many complex ideas find expression in phrases and not words. Beyond words and phrases are sentences/.. Are there ideas, expressible as sentences, which have been reduced to words? “Fire!” (an order) may look like one. But it is a sentence, an imperative one, and not just a word.
We have phrases just because we don’t see the need to express the idea as a word. In a North American native language, there are scores of words to express the different forms, shapes and structure of snow. Each such word would have to be explicated as a sentence or descriptive phrase in English. Turkish has a number of words to express the different shapes, sizes, of a man’s beard. Anyway every word has a corresponding phrase (its definition) but the reverse is not true.
Descriptive phrases take three different forms. (1) Possessive + noun the sepoys’ rebellion (2) noun + prepositional phrase the rebellion of the sepoys (3) a qualifying word without a possessive marker + noun the sepoy rebellion ( There can of course be further structure in each case; e.g. an old man with a flowing beard, where we have some adjectives thrown in.) Generally the first two options are available, but not the third: Readers’ letters; letters from the readers; * Readers letters.
Often only the noun + prepositional phrase structure is available: the tower of Pisa, the length of his nose, But this is not often realised. We find the road width (when it should be the width of the road), resource availability (when it should be the availability of resources), success chance (when it should be the chance of success). I am sure discerning readers would have noticed many such phrases where a word appears as an attributive modifier when, in fact, it should be part of a post-modifying prepositional phrase.
(The writer may be contacted at ksyadurajan@yahoo.com)
