Thursday, September 29, 2022

"result in" vs "resulting in"

(Grammar Questions I Couldn't Answer)

I was doing a lesson on useful language for cause and effect, and using Peter Pan cartoons as a prompt.

One of the students wrote, “Peter Pan made a mysterious noise, result in Captain Hook tried to find him.”

I corrected her, and said “You need to say ‘resulting in’ ?

She was confused.  “Result in” is one of the phrases for cause and effect collocation that the textbook had presented.   “What’s the rule?  When do we need to use the -ing form?  Why can’t I just say “result in” like in the textbook?

I had to think on my feet a little bit.  “You have to use the -ing form because it’s the participle clause,” I said.  “You could also do this as a relative clause. “Peter Pan made a mysterious noise, which resulted in Captain Hook trying to find him.’  Or you could break it into 2 sentences with another subject: ‘Peter Pan made a mysterious noise. This resulted in Captain Hook trying to find him.’

She gave me a confused look that students often give me when I give them too much information at once.

“I can see you're confused,” I said.  “I’ll give you some example sentences with simpler grammar.”

I wrote several sentence on the board.

“ ‘I saw the man running through the park’--this is a participle clause.  Now, we could also do this as a relative clause: ‘I saw the man who was running through the park.’  Or, we could say, ‘I saw the man. He was running through the park.’ “

But then I of course realized that this didn’t illustrate my point at all, because in each example we were using the -ing form of the verb.

So in the end, I just had to admit to the student I wasn’t sure why we used -ing form.

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