Two verbs in one sentence

Question

I have just run into the sentence that has two verbs in my English textbook "

"Every morning, he left home dressed in a fine black suit."

Is that sentence correct ?

Thanks, I got the message.

Answer 1

Yes, it is correct. "dressed in a fine black suit" is called a reduced adjective clause. A clause is a basic sentence containing a subject and verb. So we could consider this as 2 sentences put together. "Every morning he left home" and "(He was) dressed in a fine black suit." Since the subject is the same in both cases we can join the sentences using the subject only once. Thus we can eliminate the (He was) from the second clause and join the sentences. However, you have to be careful doing this and place the reduced clause as close as possible to the subject (or object) it is modifying, or you can end up with a very confusing sentence-sometimes with very funny results. Grade school teachers love collecting those!