Thursday, April 16, 2015

grammaticality - Discontinuous noun phrase and apposition involving object complements

I was wondering whether these uses of discontinuity are valid. Here are two uses I would like to question:



The use of discontinuous noun phrase:




[1a] He made the system useless that could have been revolutionary if

developed by a better programmer
.




"Useless" is an object complement while the italicized phrase is the noun phrase, or the object. As you can see, the object complement interrupts this long noun phrase.



If there was no discontinuity, it would've been something like this:




[1b] He made the system that could have been revolutionary if
developed by a better programmer
useless.





Which is quite clumsy.



Now, here is the use of discontinuous apposition:




[2a] He made the system useless, an invention that could have been
revolutionary
.





"Useless", once again, is the object complement, and the italicized phrase is an appositive modifying "system", the object. This appositive, instead of being placed right after its antecedent, is disconnected by "useless".



If there was no discontinuity present, it should have been in this format:




[2b] He made the system, an invention that could have been
revolutionary
, useless.





Well, it sounds stretched to me.



So I have shown uses of discontinuous noun phrase and apposition, which I do not know are grammatical.



Are these uses grammatical?



EDIT:



Some similar uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraposition (where it says examples).

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