Linguist Forum
Languages => Language-specific analysis => English => Topic started by: mallu on January 14, 2014, 08:20:10 AM
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I have come across this sentence in a blog .The blogger is an ESL teacher of some reputation in my area.But,the sentence sound wrong to my ears.
Could anyone tell me if the sentence is right?
"Unless this is prevented no matter whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English will have practically no effect at all"
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It's a bit rambly, but yeah it's fine! A few commas and brackets might clarify it:
Unless this is prevented, no matter whatever efforts we take (to empower teachers in English) will have practically no effect at all.
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I think it's passable to me, but I really crave for a new subject just before will close to the end of the sentence. :)
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"Unless this is prevented, no matter whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English, (...) will have practically no effect at all"
There really is something missing before will :)
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It's hard to read, but I ended up parsing it as this:
"Unless this is prevented, [no matter whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English] will have practically no effect at all"
"Unless this is prevented, [no-matter-whatever-efforts] will have no effect."
It's definitely rambling, as Cory said.
And it also might be an error with something else missing there.
As for "no matter whatever" as some kind of complex noun modifier, it's odd, arguably a speech error(?), but I could imagine it with the right intonation, though I doubt I'd say it.
It may just be an error with syntactic haplology (removing sequential identical units):
"[Unless this is prevented, no matter what efforts we take,] [whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English] will have practically no effect at all"
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I think what sets me off is the "no matter":
(1)
"Unless this is prevented, no matter whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English, (...) will have practically no effect at all"
(2)
"Unless this is prevented, whatever efforts we take to empower teachers in English will have practically no effect at all"
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Right. I read "no matter" as (an odd) intensifier for "whatever", as if it was "absolutely".
It's certainly not an average sentence, though. I don't object to calling it an error, but the reading closest to error-free is where "no matter" is extended in function to be able to modify "whatever".
I get a fairly strong intuition (though I'd need intonation to be sure) that there isn't a missing subject for "will" but that the subject is just long and complicated, and possibly some kind of syntactic amalgam.