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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