Dangling Participle

3 Key excerpts on "Dangling Participle"

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  eBook - PDF

  The Cambridge Dictionary of English Grammar

  • Pam Peters(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  ................................................................................ D ................................................................................ Dangling Participle This is the traditional name for a participial clause at the start of a sentence which is unattached to the subject NP of the following finite clause. It may involve a present or past participle, as underlined in the examples: Wondering irresolutely what to do , his alarm went off. Now injured in the stern , the captain steered the ship straight back to the port. Despite its position in the sentence, the Dangling Participle does not relate semantically to the juxtaposed subject. In the first example, it connects with a notional he, which is only obliquely there in the determiner his. In the second, it relates to the object of the clause. In neither case is it directly related to the subject, as might be expected in ordinary English syntax, which earned it the label of Dangling Participle from prescriptive grammarians, or unattached participle from more descriptive ones. Such syntactically independent constructions (known as the ablative absolute) were nevertheless endorsed in classical Latin grammar as a way of adding extra information into the sentence. See further under ablative absolute. When presented in isolation, Dangling Participles like those exemplified above make for unintended comedy. However they are less conspicuous when embedded in continuous narrative: He lay awake all night going over her revelations. Wondering irresolutely what to do, his alarm went off. As in that example, the Dangling Participle is often semantically attached to the subject or theme of the previous sentence (see further under theme, section 2). This is also true of stereotypical examples which serve as continuity markers, such as: Having said that , the plan is unlikely to be approved. Excepting that , we mean to consider all possible steps.

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  eBook - PDF

  Essential Grammar for Today's Writers, Students, and Teachers

  • Nancy M. Sullivan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Again, you can see how the noun that the participle modifies is the subject from its past life as a verb. This type of sentence combination exercise is often used in middle school and high school to help students develop more “sophisticated” sentence structures. If the participle does not logically modify a noun or pronoun, it is called a Dangling Participle. I admit to being a serial dangler, so I always check my sentences carefully for this error during the editing stage. Let’s look at an example of a dangling modifier: Speaking Spanish since the age of four, the book El Camino de Mi Vida was easy to read. The participle phrase begins the sentence, but what noun is it modifying? The book? No. The book does not speak Spanish—the participle phrase does not logically modify any noun in the sentence, and the result is a dangling modifier. How can we rewrite this sentence to make it correct? I suggest the following: Speaking Spanish since the age of four, I found the book El Camino de Mi Vida easy to read. Now the participle phrase has a pronoun (I) to modify. Here are some more examples of sentences with Dangling Participles: Being sixty-five years old, learning a second language was more difficult than expected. Living in Togo for ten years, my Kabiye language skills were much better. Arriving at a higher level of language fluency, more communication was occurring. The ability to recognize and correct dangling modifiers is tested on both the SAT and ACT exams (standardized tests required for admission to many U.S. universities). How would you fix those sentences? Below, I give the participle phrases nouns or pronouns to modify. Being sixty-five years old, Aino found learning a second language was more difficult than expected. 115 Verbals Living in Togo for ten years, Laura started to speak Kabiye more fluently. Arriving at a higher level of language fluency, he found that more communication was occurring.

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  eBook - ePub

  Participles

  A Typological Study

  • Ksenia Shagal(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2  Defining participles

  2.1  Introduction

  Although the label “participle” is widely used in the linguistic literature, the term is far from well-defined. For a typological study like this one, however, providing a precise definition of the object of investigation is of utmost importance. The goal of the present chapter is to develop such a definition, against a background of potential problems in defining the category for cross-linguistic comparison.

  I will start by presenting several traditional definitions of participles and the conceptions they are based upon. I will also show why these definitions appear to be problematic for a wide-scale typological study. This discussion constitutes the topic of Section 2.2 . As an alternative to existing definitions, in Section 2.3 I will propose a cross-linguistically applicable comparative concept of participle based on several other comparative concepts, namely the concepts of relative clause (Section 2.3.1 ), verb form (Section 2.3.2 ), and deranking (Section 2.3.3 ). Section 2.4 is specifically devoted to participle/nominalization syncretism, a very widespread phenomenon in the languages of the world, which has been pointed out in many studies, such as DeLancey (2002) , Comrie and Thompson (2007), Genetti et al. (2008) , and others. Finally, in Section 2.5 , I summarize the main points discussed in this chapter.

  2.2  Critique of the traditional definitions

  Most linguistic dictionaries and encyclopedias give quite vague definitions of participles, which often cover all non-finite forms, as in (6), sometimes with the exception of infinitives, as in (7):

  (6)	A traditional term for a non-finite form of the verb. (Hartmann and Stork 1972: 165)
  (7)	A traditional grammatical term referring to a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face. … In linguistics the term is generally restricted to the non-finite forms of verbs other than the infinitive. (Crystal 2003

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