Sophie,
Some interesting things are happening here. You say that there is no
participle here, that it is a noun phrase, a gerund. But to achieve that,
you had to change "him" to "his," the old possessive in front of the gerund
trick. I don't thinks so. This is "I saw him sitting in the park," not "I
heard his whistling in the dark."
Let's try a different tack. Let's try to get a real participial phrase that
makes it all the way back to the subject, using my sentence. How about "I
could hear him down in his workshop, wishing he would call it a night."
Does that work? Can anyone think of one that really does? And an explanation
of why?
P.S. Look at how all my commas and periods are inside the closing quotes. I
do believe that is the rule in both MLA and APA. Begging to differ with
Jeff, I don't think this is a minor point, and being consistently wrong is
not too good an idea either.
Don Stewart
--
Keeper of the memory and method of Francis Christensen.
WriteforCollege.com
The Stewart English Program (epsbooks.com)
> From: Sophie Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 10:33:38 +1000
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Those participials
>
> Don, it seems to me that in your sentence: "I could hear him down in his
> workshop, hammering away on his latest project", the sequence `hammering
> away' is prevented from modifying the subject because it is itself part of
> the object. I.e.: what "I" could hear is "him hammering away". There is no
> participle phrase here. Rather, there is a noun phrase. (And, given that we
> have a noun phrase, the relationship between pronoun and noun is genitive: I
> could hear his ... hammering.)
> Sophie
> ---- Original Message -----
> From: Don Stewart <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 4:18 AM
> Subject: Those participials
>
>
>> Now's the time for me to jump in with a question that's been on my mind
> for
>> a while. Sophie points out that the participial phrase at the end acts
> like
>> a foreshortened sentence and thus refers back to the subject. Martha adds
>> good examples and rightly advocates the use of the nonrestrictive
>> participles.
>>
>> But what about one like "I could hear him down in his workshop, hammering
>> away on his latest project"? I see that this could be written "I could
> hear
>> him hammering away on his latest project down in the basement."
>>
>> Is the ability to be written as restrictive, which seems to coincide with
>> the inability to float as a free modifier, the defining quality of this
>> participial phrase that keeps it from getting all the way back to modify
> the
>> subject?
>>
>> Don Stewart
>> --
>> Keeper of the memory and method of Francis Christensen.
>> WriteforCollege.com
>> The Stewart English Program (epsbooks.com)
>>
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