English Language & Usage Asked on October 21, 2020
Once the employees have completed the company’s largest project
successfully, they will be offered an opportunity to be
considered for a promotion.
I found that sentence in my English book and this is a little bit confusing because I am not sure WHO consider the opportunity between the employees and the company.
First, I understand the “consider” means to contemplate giving something (often a particular job or role) to someone(Link). And to see the detail meaning, I divided the sentence into two as follows.
a-1.The employees will be offered an opportunity + the company
will consider the employees for a promotion.
=a-2.The employees will be offered an opportunity + the employees will be considered for a promotion by the company.
=a-3.The employees will be offered an opportunity+ to be considered for a promotion (by the company).
I tried it like this way :
b-1.The employees will be offered an opportunity + the company
will consider an opportunity for a promotion.
=b-2.The employees will be offered an opportunity + an opportunity will be considered for a promotion by the company.
=b-3.The employees will be offered an opportunity+ to be considered for a promotion (by the company).
What makes sense to me is the situation that employees will consider the opportunity like the group of sentence A. Would you please tell me which one is the right divided sentences? And if the group sentence B are right, could you explain the precise meaning of that with nuance?
The sentence
- They will be offered an opportunity to be considered for a promotion
contains two clauses: a main clause, and an infinitive clause modifying an opportunity. Both clauses have been modified by the Passive construction, among others, and reduced by substitution and deletion rules.
Something like an unwound expansion of this sentence might be
The company isn't mentioned in the passives, but it's the agent subject of both clauses, in the active.
The clauses are in the passive form because the subject is already mentioned in the preliminary subordinate clause, and because it is obvious from the employee relation mentioned.
- Once the employees have completed the company's largest project successfully,
After this clause, both the company and the employees can be represented by them. The listener is required to understand which one, but since the company is the agent in both clauses, making them agentless passives (applying Passive without the agent by-phrase) gets rid of them. Thereafter, reference to them in this context refers to the employees.
The Passive in the main clause is complicated because it involves Dative,
which is the rule that relates these two sentences, for instance:
Passive applied to these two variants gives two variant of Passive:
The Dative Passive of the second example is what happens in the main clause.
The infinitive clause loses its original agent subject by agentless Passive,
and then loses its derived for-phrase and the receiver (not agent) subject it introduces
by ordinary infinitive reduction. Most infinitives lack an overt subject, either because the subject is not specific, or because (as here) it is specific, but it can be inferred from the syntax and the context.
Left unanalyzed is the predicative but not syntactic relation between offering an opportunity and its modifying infinitive clause -- the clause details some of the offering and some of the opportunity, and they're related in several ways; but syntactically, all one can say is that the infinitive modifies the noun phrase.
Answered by John Lawler on October 21, 2020
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