英文文法: Given no one to justify it to怎么理解和文法
Source: Zhihu
(prepared by: alexcwlin; edited by: Adam Lam)

Question:

Flipped (怦然心动)原著中的一句话:Given no one to justify it to怎么理解?

“Given no one to justify it to, the man would stare out the window until he fell asleep.”

请问这句的的语法结构是什么呢？

alexcwlin comments:

“Flipped” is one of my all-time favorite movies, although I didn’t read the book.

It was a love story between 2 teenagers which started out that a girl, Julianna, was infatuated with her neighbor-classmate Bryce.

A.    Meaning of “Given no one to justify it to…”

The line came from the starting paragraph of Chapter 4 of the book describing the behavior of Julianna’s grandfather who newly moved in to live with her family.

What he habitually did was staring into blank space outside of the window for an extended period of time in each instance.

“Given no one to justify it to” means Grandpa had no one to explain to what he was doing was appropriate. So, he just continued sitting and staring.

“Justify” means explaining why a particular action is proper.

B.    Grammatical structure of the sentence

In “given no one to justify it to, the man would stare out the window until he fell asleep“, “given” is a preposition meaning “in view of”. Therefore “given no one to justify it to” is a Prepositional Adverbial Phrase modifying the Verb “stare” explaining why he was “staring”.

For the rest, “the man” (Subject Noun Phrase) “would stare” (Predicate Verb Phrase) “out the window” (Prepositional Adverbial Phrase modifying the Verb “stare”), and “until he fell asleep” (Subordinating Adverbial Clause led by the Subordinating Conjunction “until” modifying the Verb Phrase “stare out the window”.

I hope this analysis answers your question.

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