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"It is raining."

"It is just a little."

Combined as "It is raining, but just a little,".

Does the word " is " apply to both parts ( raining and just a little), making the structure parallel because both phrases share the same word. Is this construction indeed parallel? Or It's just a silly sentence.

It's drizzling or It's just a light rain is fine I think.

However, I want to say like " It's starting to rain( but not yet realized if it's gonna be heavy or light) but just a little. ( realized that it's just a light rain)

Since I'm not native, I can't tell if the sentence is correct.

"It's starting to rain but just a little."

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    That sentence is fine. Commented Dec 13 at 11:35
  • Is it parallel ? Is my explanation correct ? Commented Dec 13 at 11:38
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    I don’t understand your explanation. And if there’s any parallelism, it’s between It’s raining and It’s [only] raining a little. Commented Dec 13 at 11:43
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    No, it is not parallel. But you are correct that [it is raining] is the semantic anchor for the second clause.
    – TimR
    Commented Dec 13 at 11:44
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    What do you mean by "parallel"? Please cite a grammatical text that defines this word so we can understand what you mean by it. Where are you finding it? You take the high road and I'll take the low road is parallel; the coordinated clauses have the same syntactic structure.
    – TimR
    Commented Dec 13 at 12:39

1 Answer 1

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Punctuation is required

A: "It is raining."

B: "It is - just a little." (The dash could be a semi-colon or even a comma.)

"It is = "It is raining

- just a little." = it is raining just a little.

just a little is an adverbial phrase modifying "it is raining."

However, I want to say "It's starting to rain but just a little. (In the sense of the weather has not decided if the rain's going to be heavy or light) (I can see that it's just a light rain or drizzle)

Correctly punctuated, your example is correct.

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