Flowers

Question

I am having problems with getting a definite answer to this. I put the question on a forum.In particular I had two very good replies, but they were not in agreement.

Here is the sentence: Jack says love to Rose, holding a bunch of flowers.

Who is holding the flowers, Jack or Rose?

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

I am having problems with getting a definite answer to this. I put the question on a forum.In particular I had two very good replies, but they were not in agreement.

Here is the sentence: Jack says love to Rose, holding a bunch of flowers.

Who is holding the flowers, Jack or Rose?

The expression 'says love to' makes no sense, has no clear meaning, but let's pretend it does.

Jack has the flowers. 'Holding a bunch of flowers' is an adverbial phrase describing how the action of saying is performed.

If the intention is that Rose has the flowers, a native speaker would not write the sentence in this way.

Clive

BritPete · Answer

Hi Clive, Thank you for your very helpful reply. I am definitely not an English teacher, but I do have friends in China who often ask me about English grammar, simply because I am a native speaker.

I was posed this question recently,I replied that Jack was holding the flowers, but the grammar, in my opinion, was poor.

My friend was very confused by this, because her English teacher had asked that question, and said that any English person would say that Rose was holding the flowers, and as she held that teacher in high regard was a little surprised about my comment about his poor grammar.

Thanks to you I can now be more precise about his grammatical error.

Incidently,the teacher in question was not Chinese.

Thanks again,

Pete.

Flowers

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