[Hogwarts students were]pulling into platform nine and three-quarters
at King’s Cross Station. It took quite a while for them all to get
off the platform. A wizened old guard was up by the ticket barrier,
letting them go through the gate in twos and threes so they didn’t
attract attention by all bursting out of a solid wall at once
and alarming the Muggles. (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)Is all a pronoun, indicating the students, or an intensifier for bursting out and alarming?
Answer
All here acts as a pronoun, the subject of both bursting and alarming. Its referent is them earlier in the sentence, which in turn refers to the students.
Traditional grammar would identify bursting and alarming as gerunds rather than participles, the nominal objects of the preposition by. Contemporary grammars prefer to find the object of by in the full non-finite clause all bursting out of a solid wall at once and alarming the Muggles. But regardless of what you call bursting and alarming, they have the ordinary properties of verbs and take their ordinary arguments, both complements and subject.
Note that the same syntactic structure would be in play if JKR had written
attract attention by all of them bursting out of a solid wall at once
attract attention by them bursting out of a solid wall at once
attract attention by their bursting out of a solid wall at once
attract attention by most bursting out of a solid wall at once
attract attention by ∅ bursting out of a solid wall at once
In all of these the emphasized element performs the same syntactic role: subject of the non-finite verb.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Listenever , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
