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Sentence:The music company was afraid the accelerating decline of sales of compact discs would not be compensated by increased internet revenue.

Solution:The music company was afraid that the accelerating decline of sales of compact discs would not be compensated by increased internet revenue.

I was given the following example. By using "that", the sentence is corrected.

I can't tell why and what's the difference in meaning with or without the word "that".

This was the given explanation:

"The original sentence has one independent clause (the music company was afraid of something) and then includes another main verb (would not be . . . revenue), but there is no conjunction to create a compound verb, so that second verb doesn’t have the same subject (company). Logically, the subject for the second verb should be the decline of sales, but this noun is in a prep phrase, so it can’t function as a subject of the sentence. One way to fix the sentence is to replace the preposition of with that: The music company was afraid THAT the accelerating decline of sales of compact discs would not be compensated by increased internet revenue. "

Can anyone please help to explain this further?

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The music company was afraid (that) the accelerating decline of sales of compact discs would not be compensated by increased internet revenue

I think that in the sentence is a conjunction and its use optional.The sentence with or without that makes no difference in meaning and the sentence is grammatically correct to me.

Here is a link which shows the usage.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/afraid

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The sentence is missing something that defines the causal relationship between "the accelerating decline of sales" and "compact discs would not be compensated [...]"

You could say as suggested:

The music company was afraid that the accelerating decline of sales of compact discs would not be compensated by increased internet revenue.

Or some others:

The music company was afraid of the accelerating decline because sales of compact discs would not be compensated by increased internet revenue.

The music company was afraid the accelerating decline was caused by sales of compact discs not being compensated by increased internet revenue.

The music company feared the accelerating decline due to sales of compact discs not being compensated by increased internet revenue.

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  • I think to a greater or lesser extent, all three of your revised versions alter the meaning of the original (which is syntactically and idiomatically fine as it stands). The second one i n particular represents a pretty radical shift in meaning - and in fact doesn't really make sense, since would pragmatically implies that there was already an accelerating decline before the possibility of "increased internet revenue" offsetting that decline became a consideration. – FumbleFingers Reinstate Monica Oct 16 '19 at 15:16
  • Agreed, but since we don't know the intent behind the sentence, I offered suggestions to more clearly convey it. – JRodge01 Oct 16 '19 at 18:30

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