LECTURE 8. B. The types of semi-compound sentences

B. The types of semi-compound sentences.

The semi-compound sentence is a semi-composite sentence built on the principle of coordination (parataxis). Paradigmatically, the semi-compound sentence is built by two or more base sentences, which have 1) an identical subject or 2) an identical predicate (or both). In the process of semi-compounding, the two predicative lines overlap around the common element, the other principal parts being coordinated. For example, sentences with coordinated (homogeneous) predicates are derived from two or more base sentences having identical subjects; they build a poly-predicate subject-sharing type of semi-compound sentence: She entered the room and closed the door behind her. - She entered the room. + She closed the door behind her. One of the base sentences, as the example shows, becomes the leading clause of the semi-compound sentence, and the other one is transformed into the sequential coordinate semi-clause (expansion), referring to the same subject.

As for coordinated homogeneous subjects referring to the same predicate not all of them build separate predicative lines, but only those which are connected adversatively, or contrastingly, or are detached in some other way, e.g.: Tom is participating in this project, and Jack too; Tom, then (not) Jack, is participating in this project. - Tom is participating in this project. + Jack is (not) participating in this project. Coordinated subjects do not form separate predicative lines with the predicate, but are connected with it as a group subject; this is shown by the person and number form of the predicate: Tom and Jack are participating in this project.

The coordinative connections between the parts of semi-compound sentences are the same as the connections in compound sentences proper: unmarked coordination is expressed by the purely copulative conjunction and or by the zero coordinator; marked coordination includes the relations of disjunction (alteration), consequence, adversative relations, etc.

Decline of the Drama.

It was inevitable that the drama should decline after Shakespeare, for the simple reason that there was no other great enough to fill his place. Aside from this, other causes were at work, and the chief of these was at the very source of the Elizabethan dramas. It must be remembered that the first playwrights wrote to please their audiences; that the drama rose in England because of the desire of a patriotic people to see something of the stirring life of the times reflected on the stage. For there were no papers or magazines in those days, and people came to the theaters not only to be amused but to be informed. Like children, they wanted to see a story acted; and like men, they wanted to know what it meant. Shakespeare fulfilled their desire. He gave them their story, and his genius was great enough to show in every play not only their own life and passions but something of the meaning of all life, and of that eternal justice which uses the war of human passions for its own great ends. Thus good and evil mingle freely in his dramas; but the evil is never attractive, and the good triumphs as inevitably as fate. Though his language is sometimes coarse, we are to remember that it was the custom of his age to speak somewhat coarsely, and that in language, as in thought and feeling, Shakespeare is far above most of his contemporaries.

With his successors all this was changed. The audience itself had gradually changed, and in place of plain people eager for a story and for information, we see a larger and larger proportion of those who went to the play because they had nothing else to do. They wanted amusement only, and since they had blunted by idleness the desire for simple and wholesome amusement, they called for something more sensational. Shakespeare's successors catered to the depraved tastes of this new audience. They lacked not only Shakespeare's genius, but his broad charity, his moral insight into life. With the exception of Ben Jonson, they neglected the simple fact that man in his deepest nature is a moral being, and that only a play which satisfies the whole nature of man by showing the triumph of the moral law can ever wholly satisfy an audience or a people. Beaumont /ˈboʊmɒnt/and Fletcher, forgetting the deep meaning of life, strove for effect by increasing the sensationalism of their plays; Webster reveled in tragedies of blood and thunder; Massinger /ˈmæsəndʒər/ and Ford made another step downward, producing evil and shameless scenes for their own sake, making characters and situations more immoral till, notwithstanding these dramatists' ability, the stage had become insincere, frivolous, and bad. In 1642, only twenty-six years after Shakespeare's death, both houses of Parliament voted to close the theaters as breeders of lies and immorality.

THE PURITAN AGE (1620-1660)

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