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) > > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html > and select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/