Unit 1, A & I Lesson 7

[Diane]

I have a question on the diagram and parsing in the student guide:

The sentence is: He has made himself a king in Soliloquy, fancies himself conquering the world, and the inhabitants thereof, consulting on proper Methods to acknowledge his Merit.

The word I am having difficulty with is inhabitants. You have it as a direct object of fancies. I would see it as a direct object of conquering.

So, he is conquering the world and inhabitants, but he fancies himself not inhabitants...

Not sure if this makes sense, but I hope so...LOL

Diane

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

You are completely right. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I apologize for the error. The double DO of 'world' and 'inhabitants' comes after conquering.

I have no idea why it was done differently. It certainly makes no sense. We will add this to our errata.

Lene

[Diane]

Thanks so much for getting back to me! I think I might finally be getting all this...LOL

[Carolyn]

In defense of the diagram that is in the book, it seems to me that
the way the diagram was draw is correct if you see it this way:

"He is fancying himself conquering the world" and also "he fancies the inhabitants thereof consulting on proper Method ..."

In other words, he fancies that the inhabitants of the world are consulting on the proper method... rather than it being he who is consulting on the proper method.

If as you were implying he is "fancying himself conquering the world" at the same time that "he fancies himself... the inhabitants thereof", the sentence starts to hurt.

So ... there are different ways to view the sentence. Ben must not have been aiming for diagrammatability when he wrote this.

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

Diane,

After looking at Carolyn's response, basically the sentence is unclear. The way she looked at it and diagrammed it for the answer key is correct, IF you take her interpretation of the sentence that

HE fancied himself conquering the world.... AT THE SAME TIME AS
He fancied the inhabitants of the world consulting....

Your interpretation (and indeed mine) that

HE fancied himself conquering the world and the inhabitants thereof while HE is the one consulting....

is also 'correct' grammatically and obviously it demands a double 'direct object' of the verbal 'conquering' whereas Carolyn's interpretation requires a double direct object of 'fancied'.

I suppose we shall never know whether it was HE who consulted on the proper methods to acknowledge his own merit, or whether the inhabitants are the ones doing so. -- A slight leaning in favor of Carolyn's interpretation is that since HE is rather full of himself and self-congratulatory, it may be more gratifying for his own ego to fancy other people consulting on proper methods for acknowledging his merit... after all, like as not HE HIMSELF already knows his own merit and therefore has no need of consulting proper methods for learning to acknowledge it.

Lene

PS: Do you want us to post links to pdfs of both possible diagrams here?