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Question

Difficulty: HardAdjectives, Adverbs, and Modifiers

Complete the text below by providing the correct restrictive adverb and correlative conjunction required for negative clause inversion.

Answer:【Hardly】 had the committee submitted its audit report 【when】 the board requested an independent review of the financial transactions.

Answer

The first blank requires a negative or restrictive adverb such as 'Hardly', 'Scarcely', or 'Barely', and the second blank requires the correlative subordinating conjunction 'when' (or 'before').
In formal English syntax, fronting a restrictive negative adverb like 'Hardly', 'Scarcely', or 'Barely' forces subject-auxiliary inversion ('had the committee'). These adverbs naturally correlate with the temporal subordinating conjunction 'when' to introduce the subsequent event.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the syntactic structure of the initial clause.
The auxiliary verb 'had' precedes the subject 'the committee', indicating subject-auxiliary inversion triggered by a fronted negative/restrictive adverbial modifier.
In formal English grammar, placing restrictive adverbs at the beginning of a sentence requires inversion of the auxiliary verb and subject.
2
Identify the appropriate restrictive adverb for the first blank.
'Hardly', 'Scarcely', or 'Barely' functions correctly as a fronted negative adverb causing subject-auxiliary inversion.
These adverbs denote that one action occurred almost immediately after another when paired with the past perfect tense.
3
Determine the corresponding correlative conjunction for the second blank.
The subordinating conjunction 'when' (or 'before') correctly completes the correlative pair with 'Hardly'/'Scarcely'/'Barely'.
'Hardly... when' and 'Scarcely... when' are fixed correlative structures in standard English syntax. Using 'than' would be incorrect as 'than' pairs exclusively with comparative structures like 'No sooner'.

Key Concept

Negative Adverbial Inversion and Correlative Modifiers
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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Topics

Adjectives, Adverbs, and Modifiers

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