I just did a sort review of Ariel's Pragmatics and Grammar for Syntax in the Schools, and Ed's sentence falls squarely into the sphere of pragmatics. What's the understood subject of "walking in"? In conversation there are enough contextual clues to virtually eliminate the ambiguity, unless your friend is a fellow grammarian who delights in playing with such ambiguities. But you had just walked in together, and so that was in the immediate context.
I suspect that in some cases of dangling modifiers the problem is also a skewed preference for the ambiguous that causes problems or that produces an odd or absurd meaning. We are careful to teach our students to avoid such ambiguities, and dangling modifiers are a frequent enough cause of them to receive special attention.
Unfortunately I've deleted some recent messages containing "convince of" example, so I don't have it handy, but that sentence illustrated the sort of dangling modifier in which one interpretation arises if we consider only sentence-level syntax and another if we consider discourse function, where the modifier was acting, as someone noted, as a sentence modifier, or, as I had thought of it, as a modifier of an unexpressed performative clause. Too much of school grammar has been taught purely at the sentence level. Certain the sentence is an important domain for a large number of grammatical phenomena, but focusing only on that directs attention away from relevant discourse factors.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
Sent: 2009-03-03 14:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Was the Needle walking in?
I was sitting in a restaurant at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New
York, looking out the window for Cleopatra's Needle, and not being
able to see it, I said to my friend, "But I saw it walking in." (It
was behind a post and couldn't be seen from where we were sitting.)
What strikes me here is that what I said was perfectly natural;
indeed, I can hardly imagine having said it any other way. And I'm
sure I did not pause or modify pitch between "it" and "walking."
Comments?
Ed S
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