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Palimpsests
The term "palimpsest" refers
to something that has been written over more than once, as in old parchments
or clay tablets that were written on (by scratching on them), then "cleaned"
by being what we would now refer to as sandpapered, and then written on
again. Often, the old writing was somewhat visible under the new. I like
to think of some sentences as involving palimpsests.
If you are just learning
to recognize S/V/C patterns, don't worry about palimpsests. They are relatively
rare, and when one appears in an exercise on this site, you will be linked
back to this page. But if you are comfortable with S/V/C patterns, you
may want to spend a few minutes thinking about palimpsests -- for they
involve sentence structure and meaning. A palimpsest
is a meaningful layering of one basic sentence pattern over another.
Consider the sentence:
The children ran wild around the house.
We can analyze this sentence in one of two ways. We can say
that "ran" is a verb and "wild" is an adverb that modifies "ran" (just
as we say that "slow" is an adverb to "go" in "Go slow."). This would give
us an S/V (child ran) pattern. Because "wild" is not a noun, we do not
have an S/V/PN or S/V/DO pattern, but what about an S/V/PA pattern? To
get a normal S/V/PA pattern, we have to be able to take the verb, ask "what?"
after it, and get a sensible answer, as in "The house is green." But in
the meaning in which it is used here, "Ran what?" is not a sensible question
(as it would be, for example, in "ran the office".)
This where the palimpsest comes
in. Why can't we look at this as two patterns embodied in one simple sentence?
We have the S/V pattern (children ran") and under it we have the S/V/PA
pattern (children *were* wild). I like this explanation because it shares
the meaning of "wild" between the "ran" and the "children." In other words,
if we look at "wild" simply as an adverb to "ran," it tells us about how
the children ran, but not about the children themselves. But if that were
all the writer meant, then the writer might well have written "The children
ran wildly around the house." In effect,
the palimpsest pattern allows the writer to make two statements in one
-- "The children ran wildy." and "The children were wild." They do not
mean the same thing.
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