This question is missing the excerpt. I've found the complete question online. It is the following:
No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, then I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!-by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman-a howl!- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dam.ned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the dam.nation.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”
The dashes in this long sentence set off a series of appositives. (An appositive is a noun or noun phrase placed beside another noun phrase and used to identify or explain it.) What noun explained by the appositives?
Answer:
The noun phrase that is explained by the appositives is:
"a voice from within the tomb".
Explanation:
<u>An appositive offers more information about a noun or noun phrase in the sentence. It can be placed before or after the noun it refers to and, unless restrictive, it can be set off by commas or dashes.</u>
In the excerpt from the short story "The Black Cat", by author Edgar Allan Poe, we have a couple of appositives:
<em>-by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman-a howl!- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the dam.ned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the dam.nation.
</em>
<u>Those appositives refer to the noun phrase that comes right before them, that is, "a voice from within the tomb." What Poe does here is offer more information concerning that voice, what it sounded like. He does it so thoroughly that we can now vividly hear that inhuman voice in our minds, imagine its force and strangeness.</u>
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NOTE: I had to type dam.ned and dam.nation like this because Brainly prevents me from posting the answer otherwise.
