I was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and then I happened to notice something like this:
The mountains around the school became icy grey and the lake like chilled steel.
I understood it as "the lake was like chilled steel" though the auxiliary verb had been omitted. I remembered catching several other occasions of this. One example is:
'I'll be back at dawn,' said Filch, 'for what's left of them,' he added nastily, and he turned and started back towards the castle, his lamp bobbing away in the darkness.
The auxiliary verb seemed to be missed intentionally in the last phrase of the sentence, as I read it as "his lamp was bobbing away in the darkness."
I just wonder if this is grammatically correct? Is there any difference between having the auxiliary verb and omitting it in these cases? Is there any special meaning by omitting the auxiliary verb in these scenarios?
Best Answer
In the first example, the verb “became” is also referring to the lake. In this case, when using a coordinating conjunction, if one does not put a comma, it is perfectly fine to skip the verb, meaning the first verb applies for the second part of the sentence.
A simpler, more familiar example would be:
It is needless to say
Similarly, if the subject is to change, we can still omit the verb and mention the new subject:
The 2nd paragraph is a different situation. The sentence “his lamp bobbing away into the darkness” is a modifier for Filch. In this situation, it is the equivalent of saying “with his lamp bobbing away into the darkness”. The modifier is not a complete sentence, it is an incomplete prepositional phrase. Here the linking conjunction/preposition is omitted, but the modifier is still a phrase, meaning it is not a complete sentence with a subject and a verb. “Bobbing” is a participle adjective describes the lamp, and is not a verb for the “lamp”.
In conclusion, since both examples are incomplete phrases that rely on what comes before them, they do not need to have a subject and a verb. The first example has an implicit verb from the part before it, while the second example doesn’t have a verb since it is a modifier phrase, and is incomplete.