Thursday, February 22, 2018

grammaticality - How is this sentence to be interpreted?

One thing that bothers me - a lot - reading older English texts, is the apparent tendency of writers to write what appear to me to be sentence fragments. For instance, today I found this old "map":



http://i.imgur.com/hPLXDrK.jpg



The map contains this sentence near the top:




"Four Hundred Passages in the Bible that Condemn the Globe Theory, or the Flying Earth, and None Sustain It"



Ignoring the actual claims made by this sentence (I've seen this type of thing in other more reputable works but I can't recall any of them at the moment), it seems to me that this isn't a valid English sentence. I have tried to determine the parts of speech and haven't come up with anything convincing. I'm trying to figure out how this could ever have been grammatically correct. The word "that" seems to completely wreck what would have been a perfectly valid construction. But even worse, with the word "that" the following "and" seems very mismatched.



Is this sort of thing deliberately a non-sentence? Is there a way to interpret it as a valid sentence? It seems like this thing was pretty common in the 19th century; is this some sort of cultural thing whereby titles of pieces of writing were overly wordy incomplete sentences? How should I interpret this sort of thing?

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