>\Janet:  The best explanation of your structure is found in Francis
>Christensen's article "In Defense of the Absolute," published first in College
>English and English Journal in May 1950 and included in his collection, "Notes
>Toward a New Rhetoric: Six Essays for Teachers," Harper and Row, 1967.

Absolute phrases are essentially noun phrases, a noun headword with one
postnoun modifier, most commonly a participial phrase--in your case, a
passive participle.  Jesperson calls your structure an absolute participle.

Absolute phrases are really sentence modifiers; they add a detail to the
sentence as a whole, as yours so nicely illustrates.  Writers use them just
as a photographer might use a close-up shot to emphasize a particular
detail of a wider shot.

The modifier following the noun headword can also be a prepositional phrase
(I stood still, my whole attention on the motion of her fingers) or
adjective phrase (I stood still, my whole body tense in the frigid morning
air).

You're right that all that's missing in the absolute is the "be"--"My whole
body was tense," etc.

I should mention too that "Notes Toward a New Rhetoric" also has a
wonderful article called "Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Modifiers
Again"--which would help clarify the recent discussion on the subject of
punctuating participles.  Christenson introduces the terms Defining and
Commenting for R & Non-R--much more helpful!

Happy Turkey Day!

Martha








Dear ATEG Listers:
>
>In the following sentence, "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the
>motion of her fingers, " (Helen Keller), I analyze 'my whole attention fixed
>upon the motion of her fingers' as a nonfinite, reduced passive clause.  I
>was trying to explain this to my class recently, and I found that though I am
>convinced that 'fixed' is nonfinite, none of my usual explanations worked.
>It simply refused to reveal itself neatly as nonfinite.
>
>When I am working with clauses having transitive verbs, I usually use passive
>transformations as a way of clarifying for myself the elements of that
>clause.  After my students had trouble seeing the clause as nonfinite, I
>spent a few minutes after class working it over.  I first tried to make it
>work as a simple transitive verb sentence with  'fixed' as a finite verb: 'my
>whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers.'  What I discovered is
>that although it is possible to write and say such a sentence, it doesn't
>behave like a transitive verb sentence, or like other clauses with 'fix' as
>their verb.
>
>For example
>'The man fixed the picture to the wall.'  This is easily made passive:
>'The picture was fixed to the wall by the man.'  However, in the case of 'my
>whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers,' I cannot make it
>passive because there is no direct object, yet 'fixed' seems to call for a
>direct object.
>
>If I change the sentence to 'my whole attention fixed itself upon the motion
>of her fingers,' the passive version is *Itself was fixed upon the motion of
>her fingers by my whole attention.  Well, that won't work.  The problem seems
>to be that 'my whole attention' as the subject can't actually perform the
>action of 'fixing'; 'my whole attention' is actually the thing that is being
>fixed and therefore is the object.
>
>I finally decided that this sentence's recalcitrance was itself evidence that
>'my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers' is actually a
>reduced version of ''my whole attention was fixed upon the motion of her finge
>rs (by me),' the active version being 'I fixed my whole attention upon the
>motion of her fingers.'
>
>So I have two questions.
>
>1.  Do you agree that 'my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her
>fingers' is actually a nonfinite clause?  Might there be an acceptable finite
>reading of this?
>
>2.  How would you explain this to a group of students who are studying to be
>teachers and who are none too comfortable with the concepts finiteness and
>non-finiteness?  I've already rejected "Because I said so."
>
>I feel compelled to add that I believe that the ability to determine whether
>a verb is finite or not in a given clause is going to be useful to these
>students in their future roles as English and language arts teachers.  I'm
>not just doing this to torture them --or myself.
>
>Janet Castilleja