4

I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.
—Jane Eyre

Does the highlighted sentence have the following structure?

Subject + verb demanding two arguments (think of) + object 1 (the word) + object 2 (as) + complement for pronoun 'as' (connected […])

1
  • 3
    @bunyaCloven's answer is correct, formally, in traditional grammar. But your analysis makes a lot of sense; I would very much like to know how newer grammars handle constructions of this sort, where the idiom requires a second complement expressed as an adverb phrase. As X here cannot be omitted. Feb 14, 2013 at 12:01

2 Answers 2

5

Highlighted sentence is not complete till the colon, and the structure is: Subject+ verb+ object(the word)+adverb(only as connected with... till the colon)

The advocacy of this thought is that the adverb is not complete without a part of it; "only as connected with" can not be split at this example, and the whole thing can answer the sole question asked to the verb with subject: "How do they think of the word?"

And back to your question: No, it just uses one object which is "the word".

3
  • The subject of the sentence is not the word, it's they; they is the noun performing the main action of the sentence, since they are the ones doing the thinking. The word is instead the object of the noun's action, since the word is what they are thinking of. Feb 14, 2013 at 14:32
  • it is what i told. but in a question to determine a verb's "duty" in the sentence; i think that having the subject and an object makes more sense if you are perfectly sure about it. Feb 14, 2013 at 16:04
  • 1
    @KenB Poster specifically identifies the word as 'object'. Feb 15, 2013 at 3:36
0

Think of uses just an object. It doesn't use two objects, differently from give, or sent.

Alice gave him the rabbit.

A girl sent him a letter.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .