Could you teach the structure of this sentence? I came across this sentence "A wonderful smile of delighted understanding spreading over his face" I couldn't the structure of this sentence. Where is

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Yuuichi Tam

Could you teach the structure of this sentence? I came across this sentence "A wonderful smile of delighted understanding spreading over his face" I couldn't the structure of this sentence. Where is a verb? Could you teach the structure of this sentence?Sorry I didn't write all the sentence. It"s "All of a sudden the Doctor looked up sharply at me, a wonderful smile of delighted understanding spreading over his face."

Apr 25, 2016 6:29 PM

Answers · 5

It's a participial phrase, acting adverbially, based on the present participle "spreading". (It's perhaps a bit confusing as you have two other verb forms that may have been decoys -- the past participle / adjective "delighted" and the gerund "understanding".)

April 25, 2016

As it is, this is not a complete sentence. There is no verb and that's why you couldn't find one! :) Here, 'spreading' is a present participle modifying the subject 'smile', but if we change it to 'spread' then we have a complete sentence: a smile spread. The other parts of the sentence are just adjectives and prepositional phrases.

April 25, 2016