quote:

---

Not more than five days after she had despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience, the widowed Lady Buxted was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence.

---

also how much do I love it that Rick Fisher diagrams sentences voluntarily for practice?

You really do it for fun?

Gotta get to bed, but will mull it around. Love to see how you handled it. Feel free to send your diagram. (Actually, I'm curious how you'll do that. I still can't open zipped files, so I hope you don't have to compress it that way. )

quote:

---

Wouldn't this diagram really be a picture of a praying mantis?

---

quote:

---

also how much do I love it that Rick Fisher diagrams sentences voluntarily for practice?

---

Minister, Jeraliey and Kolona: I agree it's adverbial, and modifies "after" (having it come off the dotted line is exactly what I did, Kolona). But "than" I treated as a preposition. All the grammarians (at least all the ones I know of) will say that it isn't. It's "I'm taller than he" rather than "I'm taller than him" because "than" is a subordinating conjunction attached to the clause "he (is)" ("is" being understood), rather than a preposition with "him" as its object. I can't figure out how to force "than five days" into that mold--but it feels to me perfectly grammatical, rather than colloquial. Maybe that's just because I've heard the construction often enough that it seems right. But what I'd really like would be to force some old-fashioned, really stiff-necked grammarian to say, "Oh. Well, maybe 'than' can be a preposition, after all."

Kolona, it'll be a .jpg picture file, no compression necessary. I'll send it pronto.

It's clunky but "more than" functions the same as "over," which is a preposition

more than| days
^ not ^after| (she...)
^five

I think the use your English teachers were thinking of for "than" is different.

quote:

---

Actually, though, it looks more like two praying mantises, making love, who got run over by a car.

---

I like the "more than" equaling "over" idea. I agree it functions that way. Does that make it a legitimate use? I couldn't find anything saying "more than" could be considered a two-word preposition. (By the way, I hope I'm not giving the impression that I'm a stick-in-the-mud grammarian. I would HATE that. It's just a case of wanting to break the rules knowingly vs. unknowingly.)

That sounds good, krazykiter, until you try to diagram the phrase, "not more than." 'Than' is the problem. It's either a conjunction or a preposition.

I can see 'than' as a preposition in the phrase. However, it bothers me that ‘than’ isn’t commonly used as a preposition. In fact, one of my dictionaries claims that “Than is sometimes considered a preposition in one phrase, than whom: an eminent judge than whom no other is more just.” One phrase. Talk about limited. Yet an Internet source states that “Than is a conjunction or preposition used in unequal comparisons.”

If we grant our problem phrase its space off the dotted line reserved for the conjunction ‘after’ (Like Rick, I cannot conceive of any other place for it.), there is an unequal comparison if we supply an inferred word, namely, another ‘days,’ as in 'Not more (days) than five days after....' We can then diagram the phrase as a compound construction, with ‘than’ on the dotted line joining the two elements: ‘more (days)’ modified by ‘Not,’ and ‘days’ modified by ‘five.’

(Reading this stuff without a diagram will make you crazy. )

You did well, Rick. That wasn't an easy one. I had to brush up on this stuff to get through it. And...I learned that 'despatch' is a form of 'dispatch.' I kept wanting to correct it.

I just might be a stick-in-the-mud grammarian type. But there are worse things. When I think of one, I'll let you know.

quote:

---

}That sounds good, krazykiter, until you try to diagram the phrase, "not more than." 'Than' is the problem. It's either a conjunction or a preposition.

---

I'd say "more than" is acting as a preposition. Replace it with "over". Meaning is identical,and over is definitely a preposition. I would diagram the two words together wherever "over" ends up. Prepositional phrases can act as adverbs (which is what we need for this to make sense) while conjunctions don't.

I don't see "after" as a conjunction, however. The point of the sentence is that the woman was relieved AFTER she had sent her message, which makes "after" the preposition and "She had despatched..." its object.

quote:

---

couldn't get the text to run angled and vertically.

---

quote:

---

The point of the sentence is that the woman was relieved AFTER she had sent her message, which makes "after" the preposition and "She had despatched..." its object.

---

[Edit:] I don't mean to make the above sound as though it should have been obvious, by the way. "After" can be a preposition, and a clause can act as a noun. The entire subject is rather messy. For a clause to serve as a noun, however, it has to be introduced by an indefinite relative pronoun, indefinite relative adjective, or indefinite relative adverb. "She had despatched..." has no such introductory word. An example of "after" as a preposition with a noun clause following would be: "Give the money to the first person you see after whenever you hear a train whistle blow." Although I can't think of a better example, it's a pretty crummy sentence. It'd be far better to drop the "whenever" and let "after" be a subordinating conjunction. [End edit.]

If "than" has to be a subordinating conjunction, then it doesn't matter if it's meaning is the same as "over". It's a sad fact of English that meaning is not enough to determine function. For example, the word "cooked" in "Those hamburgers are cooked" means the same thing as the same word in "Those hamburgers are being cooked." But in the first case it's a predicate adjective, and in the other a verb.

Personally, I have few compunctions about using "than" as a preposition, except in formal writing. But I'd like to know whether strict grammarians would say that the sentence in question is ungrammatical, or whether they would come up with some way to make a clause out of that phrase. At this point, it's more a matter of curiosity than anything else.

I appreciate all the responses to a rather dull question. And Kolona, thanks especially for your expertise.

Having written that, however, I’m stymied by the fact that I’m using a subordinating conjunction, ‘than,’ to connect words rather than clauses, not something a subordinating conjunction is supposed to do. Yet I cannot get all the elements in the sentence to fit except that way, especially the ‘not.’

So I think Rick is right: ‘than’ is a preposition here, branching off of 'more,' which modifies 'after,' with 'not' modifying 'more.' That way, ‘days’ is the object of 'than,' modified by ‘five.’ Yes. That way, the only questionable move is having anything come off ‘after’s’ dotted line, but, though I have found no samples supporting it, I find no rules against it. So, Rick, you’re the one with the expertise here.

I see where you’re coming from, krazykiter, but ‘after’ cannot be a preposition in this sentence. While it’s true some prepositions can have a clause as an object (In “The travelers had an argument about where they would stay,” the preposition ‘about’ has ‘they would stay where’ as its object.), a small number of prepositions have some restrictions. From http://grammar.uoregon.edu/conjunctions/prep_conj.html:

quote:

---

The subordinating conjunctions BEFORE, AFTER and UNTIL can act as prepositions when then are followed by objects rather than dependent clauses.

After that effort, everyone doubts whether she can win.
....
After she did so badly, everyone doubted whether she could win.
...

---

On another site, they listed ‘as’ with ‘before, after and until’ and another conjunction as well I think, that are limited in this way. In our sentence, ‘after’ is followed by a clause, which makes it a conjunction.

You say the point of the sentence is that the woman was relieved after she had sent her message. Respectfully, I don’t agree. It wasn’t the sending of the message that relieved the Lady Buxten, but her learning that Uncle Vernon had arrived. When you trim the sentence, it becomes clearer:
After she had dispatched an urgent missive, Lady Buxten was relieved to learn that Uncle Vernon had just driven up.
Our problem phrase, ‘not more than five days after,’ merely gives us a time frame, not a reason for the Lady’s relief.

Quite frankly, I’m not convinced that ‘over’ and ‘more than’ are identical in meaning and can replace each other. Apparently, this is a subject of some contention in the greater world. I found this on the Internet at http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html:

quote:

---

OVER VS. MORE THAN.
Some people claim that “over” cannot be used to signify “more than,” as in “Over a thousand baton-twirlers marched in the parade.” “Over,” they insist, always refers to something physically higher: say, the blimp hovering over the parade route. This absurd distinction ignores the role metaphor plays in language. If I write 1 on the blackboard and 10 beside it, 10 is still the “higher” number. “Over” has been used in the sense of “more than” for over a thousand years.

---

My two cents is that ‘more than’ and ‘over’ are similar, but not identical, and not necessarily interchangeable. ‘Not over five days after she had dispatched...’ doesn’t read as well as ‘Not more than five days after she had dispatched.’ And ‘over’ doesn’t accommodate the unequal comparison that ‘more than’ does, because you can’t add the inferred word, ‘days:’
not more (days) than five days
not over (days) five days

There seems to be a difference between the two, but I don’t think it’s critical to our problem sentence.

Whether we use ‘more than’ or ‘over,’ if they’re used as a preposition here, then ‘days’ is the object of the prepositional phrase, modified by ‘five.’ But what do we do with ‘not?’ It’d have to modify the preposition, 'more than' or 'over,' which is not on an adverb’s list of words to modify.

In the Lady Buxten sentence, the adverb, ‘not,’ can modify ‘more’ if ‘more’ is an adverb or adjective, but not if it’s a noun – or preposition, as far as I can tell. Unless you add the inferred word (the extra ‘days’) for ‘more’ to modify and thus make ‘more’ an adjective, then ‘more’ is a noun – and that won’t work. So we're back to Rick's solution of making 'than' the preposition. That way, 'not' can modify 'more.'

Does anyone besides me think the sentence could have been better written in the first place?

--edited to reflect Rick's solution more accurately.

The widowed Lady Buxted despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience. Less than five days later, she was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence.

I wouldn't really have done anything other than moving ", the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke" to follow "Uncle Vernon" rather than "her brother". I feel that does two things. First, it eliminates a possible source of confusion (I was expecting Lady Buxted's formal identifier to appear after the next comma). Second, it increases the tendancy of the sentance as a whole to sweep into a grander depiction of events.

Usually, I would simply suggest that "Lady Buxted" replace the first "she", but that would disrupt the rise in society which characterizes the form of the sentance as it currently exists and it would necessitate mentioning her name twice to avoid confusion.

But then, Heyer has a book published and I don't. Ah well.