FI grammar article Part 2-5 [AM]

[LMD]

@ActiveMind

Thinking about whether “still” modifies “am” or “ignorant”. I think it is “am”, because it says you are still something. It doesn’t work to say that ignorant is still, still what? Ignorant is not still “quite” at least. So “still” modifies “am”.

A way that I’ve found really helpful to check things like this is to change where the modifier is in the sentence. Elliot taught me this in my tutoring thread:

@Elliot

In English, simple modifiers tend to modify something within the next few words to their right. (And prepositional phrases tend to modify something a little to their left.)

@Elliot

This has direct relevance to analyzing the sentence and also can be used for testing things. If you think a word modifies something, try putting it in front and reread to see how it works.

In your case I think these two versions of your clause means the same exact thing:

I am still quite ignorant

I still am quite ignorant

And I think these two don’t mean the same thing. (The second one intuitively doesn’t even make good sense to me):

I am still quite ignorant

I am quite still ignorant

With modifiers of verbs I’ve found some work well immediately after as well as before what they modify. Since ‘still’ works well immediately in front of and after ‘am’, I would consider that a good clue that it modifies ‘am’.

Another clue, is that it works well at the very beginning and very end of the clause (which is lead by ‘am’), so could be thought of as modifying the whole clause:

Still, I am quite ignorant

I am quite ignorant still

A tree diagram of those two would be the same as the first two that had ‘still’ immediately before or after ‘am’.