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