I was marking some exams for my Japanese high school students, and one of the test problems is:
Arrange the following words into a sentence:
walk / started / they / soon / to
Without fail, all ~300 students wrote:
They started to walk soon
…which definitely sounds wrong to me. I believe the correct response is:
They soon started to walk
However, for the life of me, I can't figure out why the position of soon makes such a big difference in this example. Does anyone have any ideas?
Best Answer
The problem is that walk may take an adverb:
So it attracts the modifier soon, which properly goes with started. As you figured out, the way to get soon to modify the start and not the walk is to move the adverb closer to the verb it should modify and away from the verb it shouldn't.