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My student wrote down this answer in an exam.

Participating audience members in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

The original sentence is

Audience members participating in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

Chat-gpt said,

Both versions of the sentence are grammatically correct, and they convey the same meaning. The choice between "Participating audience members" and "Audience members participating" depends on personal preference and stylistic considerations. Both forms are acceptable in English.

Is it okay?

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  • 1
    What was the question the student answered?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Apr 30 at 7:18
  • 1
    @BillJ - Surely participate is an intransitive verb? You can't participate an audience member. only encourage them to participate.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Apr 30 at 7:33
  • 4
    @BillJ - Yes, but it seems to be used transitively in the first sentence. Oxford gives get involved as a synonym for participate - that sentence should be "Involving audience members in the music-making process..."
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Apr 30 at 7:42
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    It's definitely a confusing sentence even if it's grammatical. Much better to reorder: "In the music-making process, participating audience members can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved." If "In the music-making" is a sentence-level, context-setting participial phrase (rather than linked to "participating") it should probably be first or last in the sentence; here it looks like it's modifying "participating" even if it isn't.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Apr 30 at 9:15
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    Both phrases are ambiguous. Do you mean "Audience members who are participating" or "Getting audience members to participate"?
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 30 at 16:49

3 Answers 3

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I think there are two ways of interpreting the second sentence.

Audience members participating in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

In one, Audience members participating is the subject, and it means

The participation of audience members in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

In the other one, audience members is the subject, and it means

Audience members who participate in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

The difference is whether it's the audience members who enhance the level of engagement, or whether it's the fact that audience members are participating that enhances the level of engagement. This difference seems minor, but for other sentences with the same sentence structure, it might be quite large.

Intuitively, I would say that the first interpretation is more likely. However, the second interpretation is the one that has the same meaning as the sentence:

Participating audience members in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

So I would say that the OP's two sentences don't quite mean the same thing; or rather, that they only mean the same thing if you construe the first sentence to be the least likely of its two alternative parsings.

If you used involving rather than participating in the OP's sentence:

Involving audience members in the music-making process can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved,

then it would mean the same thing as my preferred interpretation of the second sentence. But involving is a transitive verb, and participating isn't. This probably accounts for some of the comments claiming that the first sentence is ungrammatical.

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  • You have the interpretations the wrong way round. In your first interpretation, the subject is not “audience members participating”, but the full NP “audience members participating in the music-making process”. Semantically, this is similar to the relative clause in “audience members who participate in the music-making process”, the meaning that you incorrectly attached to your second interpretation.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 1 at 9:03
  • So, your second interpretation is in fact the correct interpretation of the first one, although you truncated the subject NP for no good reason. However, you are parsing “audience members participating in the music-making process” as a clause with “audience members” as subject. Clausal subjects are possible in English grammar, but there is nothing to suggest that this is a viable parse in this case, particularly as it was not the intended interpretation by the student who wrote it.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 1 at 9:04
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[1] [Participating audience members in the music-making process] can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

[2] [Audience members participating in the music-making process] can enhance the level of engagement and enjoyment for everyone involved.

Yes, its alright.

I take "participating" in [1] to be a gerund-participle verb functioning as an attributive modifier of "audience members", so that "participating audience members in the music-making process" is a noun phrase functioning as subject.

The meaning then matches that of the second example, where the "participating" clause is also a modifier of "audience members".

Some people may suggest that [1] is intended to have a causative meaning, but since it is intended to be an alternant to [2] that cannot be the case and the bracketed elements are thus noun phrases functioning as subjects.

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  • You can't just rearrange words in sentences and preserve the same meaning. People talking to gurus often receive enlightenment but not Talking people to gurus often receive enlightenment.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Apr 30 at 12:36
  • @PeterShor Nonsense. If you disagree, put your own answer up.
    – BillJ
    Commented Apr 30 at 12:44
  • @PeterShor It happens all the time that sentences with different structures and terminology can have the same meaning. In any case, your examples bear no similarity to the OP's and they have a different structure. The OP's examples both talk of audience members involved in the music-making process. Further, the OP acknowledges (at least according to Chat-gpt) that both examples have the same meaning. I repeat my earlier comment: "put your own answer up".
    – BillJ
    Commented Apr 30 at 13:00
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I would understand the original sentence to mean

When audience members participate in the music-making process, it can enhance the level of... enjoyment for everyone.

Participate means 'take part, get involved'. To me, that is an intransitive verb; someone else doesn't 'participate the audience members'. You don't say what the student was asked to do - presumably it was to rewrite the sentence? I would have changed the verb to 'involving the audience members'.

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