Bill,
   How do you deal with absolutes? Or instances when they could be 
thought of as subject bearing?

"I watched my father waste away from cancer."

"She felt the wind grow stronger."

"Their legs dangling down, they rode in the boxcar door."

Are these clauses missing just the finite marker?

I think what bothers me more than anything is when absolutes are called 
"phrases." Diana Hacker, in the most recent Writer's Reference, calls 
them "a noun phrase followed by a participial phrase."  Trying to hold 
on to these traditional categories can stimulate  goofy descriptions.

Craig


Spruiell, William C wrote:
> Until the early twentieth century, people who wrote grammar books tended
> to use terms like "phrase" and "clause" rather unsystematically -- they
> were descriptive labels, but not precisely defined ones. The way the
> terms are used in U.S. K-12 education is the result of a consensus that
> developed among educators on this side of the Atlantic, but it's not a
> universal consensus. A good many Commonwealth grammarians (for example,
> many in the Systemics approach, but certainly not limited to it), use
> "group" for what most Statesiders would call a phrase (basically, any
> phrase that all of us would view as endocentric is a "group," but an
> arguably-exocentric constituent without a predicate is a "phrase," with
> the prepositional phrase being the prime example). Similarly, the
> requirement that a clause have a subject and finite verb is part of the
> consensus that developed here, but not elsewhere.
>
> I like to view gerunds, infinitives, etc. as kinds of *predicates* --
> but that's based on an approach in which the clause has three, rather
> than two, major constituents: subject, finite marker, and predicate. I
> derived that from SFL, but there are analogues in other modern
> approaches and there are certainly historical precedents for that
> tripartite division. It's not part of the K-12 consensus, though, such
> that it is, so I don't harp on it much in my pedagogic grammar classes.
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
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