So Vitto said expletives add no meaning to the sentence. Though technically by definition it kind of doesn’t but I feel like it does, I feel like it has almost as much as an importance as does adjectives and adverbs. It gives a range of emotion to the sentence. So therefore, like she said, it technically can’t be taken away but this counters her ideology of expletives not being important/no meaning to the sentence. 

Some of the exercises were confusing for me.

The phrasing of this section is (ironically) kind of awkward, but I can see the idea. Again, substituting parts of the sentence with phrases of similar meaning like “to be” is helping to put everything together. However, “as” it piling up complications around it, and it’s starting to feel like “as” is going to cause a lot of problems later on, considering I don’t think I’ve seen it used it any of the book’s exercises, at least not recently. The fact that it can’t fit into sentence 10 patterns, but only usually, is already making me dizzy.

Vitto goes into detail about special structures at the end of chapter 3. It was hard for ne to wrap my head around this topic at first. I understand how explicitives can sometimes be necessary to a sentence’s structure. Without thwm sometimes, the sentence just doesnt make any sense. Using the “to be” test really help with my understanding the difference between the direct object and the object compliment.  I find that the “to be” test between the direct object and the objective complement to be helpful. The area I’m struggling most woth this concept is the diagramming. I’m hoping that this will become more clear when go more in depth with this topic in class. 

Special structures can be difficult. There are a few tricks that I found to be helpful but I cannot rely on them in every instance. I found that I do need to be able to dissect the structures and patterns better. I was looking back to my notes when she referred to patterns from the previous chapters to make sure that I was following correctly. I find that the “to be” test between the direct object and the objective complement to be helpful. I think that the expletive, phrasal verb, and the idiom were straightforward. I confuse myself with the vocabulary. I know their meanings but then I second guess myself. My concerns are the diagramming. I know what I am doing for the most part but I will overthink those as well. I had to take a minute with the adverbial objective to assure myself that I was diagramming them correctly. I made a mess of number four in exercise 3.8 but I see where my confusion was. I just need to keep at it. Practice makes perfect. 

In the end of chapter 3 Vitto spoke about special structures. I was confused on the example she provided about “as” being expletive. She mentioned how expletives are words that adds no meaning to the sentence, and how “as” could  be replaced with the phrase “to be” in a pattern 10 sentence. Later in the reading she notes that it is not always possible to delete the expletives. I did not understand why expletives could not be removed if they held no meaning.