A Comma Will Sort It Out

What does this sentence mean: I did not review your proposal because I did not believe it had any merit. Tough words to read from a teacher or boss, but before we let our emotions go, what does it really mean according to its grammatical construction? Such sentences are not infrequently encountered.

Almost certainly we understand that sentence to mean this: I did not believe your proposal had any merit and so I did not review it. That is to say, we believe the clause beginning with the subordinating conjunction because indicates the reason for not reviewing the proposal. That, however, is not what this sentence means, and it doesn’t mean that, because there is no comma after the opening independent clause. But what does that mean?

The purpose of a comma is to cut, to separate one element from another in order to deflect the attracting power of the element which follows it. There are three grammatical elements: word, phrase, and clause, and in the sentence we are looking at here, it is the clause that concerns us most. The sentence is complex, having an independent clause as it opens and a subordinate clause as it concludes. No comma separates these two elements, and so the grammatical power of the following subordinate clause filters into the structure of the preceding independent. No cell wall protects one from the other.

Subordinate clauses beginning with the conjunction because are adverbial, which means they most often modify the verb of an adjacent clause. The verb of the preceding independent clause is did not review, and it is important to note that this is a negative construction and that the verb (did review) and its own adverb (not) cannot be taken apart. Since no comma stands between this independent clause and the following adverbial clause, that adverbial clause does what adverbs do best: modify verbs. And so absent the comma, the subordinate clause because I did not believe it had any merit passes into the negative verb did not review, giving the reason for an action not taken.

But an action was taken, or better, a decision not to review was made, and so what was the reason for that? If no comma separates the negative independent clause from a because-clause immediately subsequent, then we are to understand (and, hopefully, read or hear) something like this: I did not review your proposal because I did not believe it had any merit; I did not review it because it was late. In other words, the second because-clause is explaining the reason something didn’t happen; the first because-clause is explaining what wasn’t the reason something didn’t happen. (If you have trouble seeing this, speak the sentence aloud, raising the pitch of your voice slightly on the word merit, as if to clarify a misunderstanding on the part of the listener).

So how would the sentence look had the writer simply wanted to say directly why the proposal was not reviewed? I did not review your proposal, because I did not believe it had any merit. That comma between the two clauses (an exception to the general rule that no comma separates an independent clause from a following subordinate one) now breaks the power of the adverbial clause, redirecting it to affect the entire preceding independent clause—subject, negative verb, and direct object, not simply the negative verb structure alone. With the comma, the subordinate clause acts, in effect, as what is called a sentence adverb, whereby the adverbial element modifies the entirety of a clause, not just one discrete part of it.

Such are the technics of English grammar and punctuation, found not only in expensive literary stylings, but even in ordinary negative sentences with so basic a word as because and so common a mark as a comma.

***