I read Step 4 – Modifiers for 9 mins and worked on this post for ~20 minutes.
To understand a modifier, you must figure out what it modifies. In “John throws red balls.” you need to understand that “red” applies to “balls” not to “John”.
Yeah, it looks like it’s gonna take skill and practice to know what the modifier is modifying.
The difference isn’t very important conceptually (they’re both modifiers, similar to how action verbs and linking verbs are both verbs).
Good to know. I think I get the difference between the two, but overall I get that modifiers change the word that they modify. Like they give more information about the word that’s being modified.
In “dark red ball”, “dark” is an adverb that tells you the shade of red.
I see how asking questions like “what kind of red is it?” helps to figure out what word modifiers belong to.
Finding modifiers , and figuring out what they modify, is step four for understanding a sentence.
Ok, step four for analyzing a sentence is find modifiers and find the word they’re modifying. Maybe modifiers can modify not just a word but a phrase too. I don’t remember that well about that.
A tricky one is that “cute” answers “How does it look and/or act?”. A reasonable person could write the question differently for “cute”.
I’ve seen some more complicated writing like Popper and Rand how it doesn’t look easy to find what’s being modified.
If I say “cat”, people won’t know which cat I mean. If I say “a cat” then I mean an indefinite, unspecified cat, “the cat” means a definite, particular cat, and “this cat” means the cat near me.
Yeah, I think I need more practice on when to use “a” and “the”. I think I mix those up sometimes. I’ll look it up
Detail: Verbs can be modified by other verbs. Modifier verbs are called “helper” or “auxiliary” verbs, not adverbs. In “I will practice grammar.”, the verb “practice” is modified by the helper verb “will” which changes it from present tense to future tense.
I remember using auxiliary verbs as secondary verbs in the sentence, but recently I’ve been reading @Eternity’s Async Tutoring thread where auxiliary verbs seem more to act as main verbs of the sentence.
Quote below about auxiliary verbs in the Async thread:
To my understanding auxiliary verbs like will and have are main verbs of the sentence, and the other verb “main” verb in the sentence is the infinitive that modifies the auxiliary verb. I think I get that. I just don’t remember much about infinitives yet.