At 02:22 AM 12/04/2000 -0500, Ed Vavra wrote:

>Question: Is the following sentence an example of a comma-splice, or an
>example of a well-written sentence?
>
>My dog moaned, its tail stuck between its back legs.

That's a pretty standard example of a "nominative absolute." That's the
term I learned in grade school in the fifties and find indexed in Roberts'
1954 Understanding Grammar. The term "absolute" is used in several more
recent grammar texts, but neither term is indexed in Greenbaum's Oxford
English Grammar. Curious minds wanting to know, is there other terminology
for such constructions?

Dick Veit