Thursday, June 20, 2013

Relative pronoun structure beginner's question



I have 2 sentences and I have to join both in a single sentence with a relative pronoun:




People visit CityA.
They love to ride the cable cars.





I am confused by the publisher of the question which states the below sentence to be the answer:




People who love to ride the cable cars visit CityA.




It seems to me that this answer has a different meaning from the question, and the below sentence is more appropriate instead:





People who visit CityA love to ride the cable cars.




Please advise.


Answer



I think the problem centers around the phrase "the cable cars." It would be helpful to know who published the book. In my experience, non-native speakers (and that means non-native publishers of English learning material) have troubles with "the." My gut feeling on this is that by "the cable cars" the publisher means "The city's cable cars," or "The cable cars operating in the city." I think the logic of the publisher is: "People visit city A, and when they do visit City A they love to ride City A's cable cars." This is my interpretation (based on my experience with non-native problems with "the") of what the publisher is thinking. Unless we ask, we cannot know.



I'm going to replace "City A" with "San Francisco" so this is easier to visualize:




People visit San Francisco.
They love to ride San Francisco's cable cars. (I have replaced "the" with San Francisco.)



People who love to ride San Francisco's cable cars visit San Francisco.



This is still a bit wordy because we have "San Francisco" twice. You could clean it up thus: "People who love to ride San Francisco's cable cars visit the city." Alone, without context, the sentence is ambiguous because someone will ask "which city? you could mean any." In other words "People who love San Francisco's cable cars also visit this other city because the cable cars are similar." However, I think in an article about travel or cable car aficionados it would be clear.



In any case, it's still a can of worms. If I were writing an article about travel or cable car aficionados, I wouldn't use the sentence, or I would further define "the city." You can't really do that because it's an exercise in a textbook.



Without this interpretation, as others pointed out, the exercise is ambiguous.



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