We saw a boy dashing across the road...

[Tan Elaine]

We saw a boy dashing across the road and a car running over him.

Is the sentence fine?

Thanks.

 

[Rover_KE]

I have changed your thread title.

As you know, 'Thread titles should include all or part of the word/phrase being discussed.'

 

[Tan Elaine]

Could someone please help? Thanks.

 

[jutfrank]

Your sentence is not too bad. There are lots of slightly better ways to say it. Perhaps:

We saw a boy dash out into the road and get hit by a car.

 

[GoesStation]

Ask Is the sentence correct/okay/natural? The answer may be Yes, it's fine, but we don't use that word in questions.

 

[Tan Elaine]

So the sentence should be:

We saw a boy dashing across the road and getting run over by a car.

Thanks.

 

[Tan Elaine]

No. Did you read posts 4 and 5?

Yes. But I would like to make sure I understood the replies. Am I missing something?

I think the sentence should be:

We saw a boy dashing across the road and get run over by a car. ( I have changed 'getting' to 'get'.)

Am I correct this time? Thanks.

 

[ChinaDan]

So the sentence should be:

We saw a boy dashing across the road and getting run over by a car.

No. Did you read posts 4 and 5?

Yes. But I would like to make sure I understood the replies. Am I missing something? Thanks.

Posts #4 & #5 are telling you to use the simple form for your verbs; "dash" and "get".

You keep returning to the continuous form of these verbs; "dashing", "getting".

"We saw a boy dashing..." feels wrong. "We were watching a boy dashing..." works much better. Then you write your sentence this way:

"We were watching a boy dashing across the road when suddenly he got run over by a car".

Even now, I would question why we want to use the continuous verb "watching". The sentence is grammatically correct, but usually we would use the simple form, and say:

"We saw a boy dash across the road, then get hit by a car",
OR,
"We saw a boy try to dash across the road, but halfway across he was run over by a car".

You could also drop the "We saw...", and say, "As a boy was dashing across the road, he got run over by a car", but it needs that change in structure.

There is no need for the continuous form here the way you want to construct the sentence. It's okay, but it makes the sentence awkward. Here is how you might naturally, and usefully, employ the continuous in a followup sentence, and keep your "We saw...":

"We saw a boy try to dash across the road, but he got run over part way across. As he was getting run over, I had the bizarre hope that, at any moment, the car would transform into an Autobot and step harmlessly over him."

I used "getting" for consistency, but I'd prefer to say "being".

The difference is that, in the second sentence, I need to use the continuous "getting" (which means I want you to think about the process, or I want you thinking about this as a period of time, not as a momentary event), because I need to speak about something that happened while the boy was being run over.

Does this make sense?

 

[Tan Elaine]

Thanks, ChinaDan.

We saw a boy dash across the road, then get hit by a car..

Does "saw a boy dash across the road" imply that the boy had safely reached the other side of the road and hence he cannot be hit by a car?

 

[ChinaDan]

Thanks, ChinaDan.

We saw a boy dash across the road, then get hit by a car..

Does "saw a boy dash across the road" imply that the boy had safely reached the other side of the road and hence he cannot be hit by a car?

Yes, Piscean is correct about that part. The boy would have been struck on the pavement. Grammatically correct, of course, but probably not what you intended.

As for the parts about the continuous aspect, Piscean is just mad at me.

Continuous applies for a period of time regardless of how brief it is unless it's so fast as to be considered instantaneous. "Simple" is used for something in a moment of time, (the race car was 2 feet short of the finish line when the engine exploded); and continuous is used for anything the happens as a process, anything that takes time to occur, like, oh I dunno, running across a street.

Here, keep it simple... Suppose you saw this accident happen, and you are now giving your report to a police officer:

"We were watching this kid dashing across the street when this car seemed to come out of nowhere and run him over in the far lane"!

Piscean's example also works:

"We watched this kid dash out into the street. He had almost made it across when this car seemed to come out of nowhere and run him over".

It's all telling the same story. Here's one more:

"I saw this kid dashing across the street at the same time a car was coming fast up the far lane. The kid and the driver of the car somehow didn't see each other, and the car ran the kid over right there in that lane".

One all "simple"; one half "simple", half "continuous"; and one all "continuous".

All perfectly good English.

 

[Tan Elaine]

Thanks, ChinaDan.

I think Piscean is laying stress on the word "across". What he was driving at was "across" implies that the dog has crossed to the other side of the road, whether "dash" or "dashing" is used. Hence "across" should not be used in the sentence.

Please see his last post [#14].

 

[ChinaDan]

Thanks, ChinaDan.

I think Piscean is laying stress on the word "across". What he was driving at was "across" implies that the dog has crossed to the other side of the road, whether "dash" or "dashing" is used. Hence "across" should not be used in the sentence.

Please see his last post [#14].

He is correctly pointing out that if we say "dashed across", then the boy made it all the way to the other side. The language tells us the event was completed. We don't want that, because the boy does not make it across in the story. We could fix this by saying, "dashed part way across", modifying our action to show it wasn't completed.

However, it is okay if we say, "dashing across", because the language signals that the event is still in progress. Now we can introduce another event (the car hitting the boy) during the process of the boy dashing across the street. The boy doesn't finish the action he started. This makes perfect sense.

We can also use "dashed", if we change what we say the boy is doing. Since the story requires the boy to still be in the street somewhere when the car comes along, we could say, "...dashed into the street..." as has also been suggested by others.

 

[Tarheel]

ChinaDan, you can always put somebody on "Ignore" if they are bothering you too much.

As for the sentence in question, I suppose it has been explained in sufficient detail.

 

[ChinaDan]

Actually, there was one more facet to this I thought about last night which may mean something to Tan Elaine.

I was thinking about a report for a failed space vehicle atmospheric entry. It could go like this:

"...the vehicle was due to make planetfall at +157 minutes. However, at +135 the command to deploy chutes failed to activate the system, and the vehicle continued its decent at terminal velocity, impacting the surface at +139:11, instantly killing the entire crew compliment."

Disclaimer: I am not a rocket scientist. I've no idea if the periods of time or terminology is accurate. It is purely a grammatical exercise.

Here is where I'd like clarification from someone. There is nothing wrong with these sentences, but I don't know how to explain the grammatical rules that apply here. As I've shown in this thread, I've always thought of progressives as "occurring over time", yet these two examples appear to contradict that.

After a little searching, I found multiple situations under which we might use the progressive/continuous form, but none seemed to address my above examples of more or less instantaneous events taking the progressive verb.

Anyone know how to correctly describe this usage of the progressive?