A fascinating sentence, both image and structure, and an interesting set of analyses.  So let's try another one.  It's an existential sentence in which the original verb phrase becomes a participial phrase and replaces the subject "there", with a derivation, for those of us who like derivations, something like this:

A patch of white hair that opens up into his lips runs from the back of his skull down to the front.

Since English tends to avoid indefinites in subject position, this sentence is better expressed as the existential

There is a patch of white hair that opens up into his lips, running from the back of his skull down to the front.  (I put in a comma simply to avoid confusion with running lips (sink ships?).)

This writer then has cleverly moved the participial phrase into subject position, maybe because some teacher once said not to start a sentence with "there is", giving us

Running from the back of his skull down to the front is a patch of white hair that opens up into his lips.

The reasons for considering it an existential sentence are the indefinite postposed subject and the copula, further supported by the otherwise anomalous participial phrase subject.  

The comma, I think, is unrelated to any of this.  Rather, there is a tendency among inexperienced writers, and experienced ones as well, to insert a comma between a long subject and the verb.

Herb

 
A student wrote the following sentence in an essay:

Running from the back of his skull down to the front, is a patch of white
hair that opens up into his lips.
The comma doesn't belong there, but I'm not sure why.  Is the "Running"
phrase a gerund?  If so, then I understand why the comma is wrong:  it
separates the subject from the verb  However, the phrase doesn't behave like
a gerund.  Compare:

Running around the lake is a part of my daily routine. --> It is a part of
my daily routine.  --> A part of my daily routine is running around the
lake.

In this sentence, the "Running" phrase behaves like a true noun phrase in a
linking verb sentence.  My student's "Running" phrase doesn't behave like an
NP.  It feels participial, modifying "patch".  If so, then the comma would
be correct.  But it's not.

Any ideas out there?

John

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