"A screaming" - question to native speakers

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Heikki
Raudaskoski<hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>
>
> The scarlet letter "A" screaming comes through the sky...
>
>
> Heikki


"A"--soon to be split in mid-air over Hiroshima--screaming comes across the sky.

Damn, it doesn't quite parse but almost.

Incidentally I meant to make reference to a cartoon a few days ago in
the Washington Post in which a man sitting on the beach was watching a
sky-writing airplane emitting that famous opening line. I guess the
idea was summer reading at the beach.

P


> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Paul Mackin wrote:
>
>> I wasn't sure I understood Janos' question.
>>
>> Semantically  of course we don't know yet whether the screaming was
>> from a human, another primate, or was a scream-like sound generated by
>> an inanimate object.
>>
>> But syntactically (grammatically), the construction is completely
>> straightforward.  A verbal noun (gerund) preceded by an indefinite
>> article.
>>
>> P
>>
>> 2009/6/30 Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>:
>> > I have to choose option #3.  It seems to me to be as onomatopoetic as
>> > it is anything else.  It is a particular screaming only after we read
>> > on.  Its initial signified meaning is unknown, so it might be any
>> > screaming, physical, metaphysical or hallucinatory.  That ambiguity is
>> > a part of the greatness of it as an opening phrase.  The first thing
>> > that happens to the reader is that he (and / or she) is cast out of
>> > certainty like a progenitor from Paradise.
>> >
>> > 2009/6/29 János Székely <miksaapja at gmail.com>:
>> >> I'm writing an essay on translating GR and I'm having doubts "after
>> >> the fact": Would you read "a screaming" in the first sentence as
>> >> - pronoun + countable noun, or as
>> >> - a [kind of] screaming,
>> >> or is it ambiguous?
>> >>
>> >> Thx
>> >> János
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>