My Florida Home

If an acquaintance happened to mention to you casually one day that my house in Florida needs a new roof, you would be right to wonder just how many homes he in fact has. You would be right, that is, to infer that he had at least one other home, but what about the sentence structure of his remark would make that inference possible?

To infer means to conclude by reasoning (it is often confused with imply, meaning to suggest, which we may do reasonably or unreasonably); to reason means to move logically in our minds from what is known to what that something known entails. The problem with life, however, is that not everything ultimately knowable is immediately visible. Reason, therefore, involves analysis. The terms reason and analysis are close synonyms, but we can see better how this way of using the mind works by understanding the derivation of the term analysis.

In its original Greek, to analyze something means to loosen it apart, to isolate the components of something and see how one part works in relation to another. This is why the traditional way of studying language and composition has put so much emphasis on sentence structure. To be able to see the composing elements of a sentence and then be able to understand how one element connects grammatically to the next—this entire analyzing, or loosening, procedure matches in reverse the synthesizing, or binding, procedure by which the writer originally put the sentence together.

Reasoning and analysis can be, then, like a game of hide-and-seek. Something is lurking behind what we obviously perceive, and the game, the play of consciousness, is to look both at and behind what we are aware of; sometimes they are physical entities, called objects, and sometimes mental entities, called ideas. But the point, like the game, is always to find existing what we reasonably suspected was there all the time but didn’t immediately realize, to come upon what is connected in some way to what we already know to be true.

So when that acquaintance referred to his house in Florida, enunciating those words with no pause at all between the words house and in, he intended to use the prepositional phrase in Florida to define or differentiate the house to which he was referring. We can see this better if we remember that the phrase house in Florida is an elliptical variation of the clause house that is in Florida, and in that full grammatical statement, we can see that the noun house is being modified by a restrictive relative clause, that is in Florida. A relative clause is one which begins with a relative pronoun (here that), and a restrictive relative clause is one which is defining its antecedent (house) by attributing essential, characterizing information to it. The relative pronoun that can only be used restrictively, and such clauses are never set off with commas.

Thus, the house this person is referring to is his Florida house, as opposed, we may surmise, to some other one or many houses he might own elsewhere. We may infer this, then, because the speaker with his voice (or the writer with the pronoun that absent the commas) has taken the trouble linguistically to define, not merely describe, the house he is referring to. If the facts were otherwise, that the person had only this one home in Florida, then in speaking the sentence, there would be a brief (very brief) pause before and after the phrase in Florida, or in writing it, there would be the relative pronoun which, with commas isolating the relative clause: my house, which is in Florida, needs a new roof.

An analytical knowledge of sentence structure gives us the decided advantage in understanding not only what is explicitly heard or read, but what such explicit information implies—an important position to hold when we realize how much power what remains unspoken, as with the proverbial naked emperor, can really command.

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