Strunk and White describe as "ludicrous" another of their examples:
i. A: Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy
the house very cheap.
B: Not amazing.
The utterer obviously means the house was dilapidated, but the construction
suggests that he (the utterer, identified as "I" – vide Grice, “Peresonal
Identity”) was dilapidated.
Bernstein offers another ludicrous example:
ii. A: Roaring down the track at seventy miles an hour, the
stalled car was smashed by the train.
B: Amazing.
The adjunct is meant to modify “train.” It is the train that is roaring down
the track.
But the subject of the main clause is "the stalled car".
The utterer is suggesting (or implicating) that the stalled car, which really
is not moving at all, is roaring down the track.
The utterance could be re-uttered more felicitously (‘felicity’ was one of
Austin’s favourite concepts):
iii. A: Roaring down the track at seventy miles an hour, the
train smashed the stalled car.
Or:
iv. The stalled car was smashed by the train, roaring down the
track at seventy miles an hour."
Follett provides yet another ludicrous example:
v. A: Leaping to the saddle, his horse bolted.
B: Amazing.
But who leaped? Presumably the horseman – certainly not the horse, which was
wearing the saddle.
In this example, the noun or pronoun intended to be modified is not even in the
utterance. Unproblematic:
vi. Leaping to the saddle, he made his horse bolt forward.
or
vii. As he leaped into the saddle, his horse bolted.
In the latter, the non-finite adjunct clause is replaced by a finite
subordinate clause.
These examples illustrate a Griceian principle that dangling participles
violate.
Follett states the principle:
"A participle at the head of an utterance automatically affixes itself to the
subject of the following verb – in effect a requirement that the utterer either
make his [syntactic] subject consistent with the participle or discard the
participle for some other construction."
Strunk and White put it this way:
"A participle phrase at the beginning of an utterance must refer to the
syntactic subject."
Dangling participles should not be confused with clauses in absolute
constructions, which are considered _okay_.
Because the participle phrase in an absolute construction is NOT semantically
attached to any single element in the sentence, it is easily confused with a
dangling participle, though.
The difference is that a participle phrase is intended to modify a particular
noun or pronoun, but is instead erroneously attached to a different noun,
whereas as an absolute clause is not intended to modify any noun at all. An
example of an absolute construction is:
viii. The weather being beautiful, we plan to go to the beach today.
Non-participial modifiers that dangle can also be troublesome:
ix. A: After years of being lost under a pile of dust, Walter P.
Stanley, III, left, found all the old records of the Bangor Lions Club.
B: Amazing.
The above utterance, from a newspaper article, suggests that it is the subject
of the sentence, Walter Stanley, who was buried under a pile of dust, and not
the records. And while this is not impossible, it is not ‘conversationally
expectable,’ as Grice has it.
It is the prepositional phrase "after years of being lost under a pile of dust"
which ‘dangles,’ to use Grice’s slang.
This example has been cited in at least one usage manual as an example of the
kind of Griceian ambiguity (in terms of the implicatures the utterance invites)
that can result from a dangling modifier.
Cheers,
Speranza
