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In grammar, a dangling modifier is a misplaced modifier — a word or phrase that is intended to modify one element of a sentence but, owing to its placement in the sentence, seems to modify another element or none at all. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ...
For the rules of English grammar, see English grammar and Disputes in English grammar. ...
In grammar, a modifier (aka qualifier) is a word or sentence element that limits or qualifies another word, a phrase, or a clause. ...
Look up phrase in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ...
Dangling modifiers often appear at the beginning of a sentence, and are commonly found in adverbial phrases; rather than modifying the grammatical subject of the sentence, they seem to modify an unintended noun or pronoun due to the position of the modifier within the sentence. Strunk and White's Elements of Style provides an example: An adverbial phrase is a linguistic term for a phrase with an adverb as head. ...
The Elements of Style (the little book – 1918) is an American English writing style guide detailing seven elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition and a few matters of form and commonly misused expressions. ...
| “ | Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap. | ” | Presumably, the speaker means that the house is in a dilapidated condition, but due to the placement of "being in a dilapidated condition", it sounds as though the speaker is saying of himself that he's in a dilapidated condition.
Perhaps the most (in)famous of the danglers is the participle, as illustrated by Strunk and White's example above. But other modifiers' dangling can be just as much trouble. Consider, for instance, "As president of the kennel club, my poodle must be well groomed." In linguistics, a participle is a non-finite verb form that can be used in compound tenses or voices, or it can be used as a modifier. ...
Modifiers sometimes are intended to describe the attitude or mood of the speaker, even when the speaker isn't part of the sentence. Some such modifiers are fairly standard and are not considered dangling modifiers—"speaking of [topic]", for example, is commonly used as a transition from one topic to a related one. However, in a sentence such as "fuming, she left the room", "fuming" can only mean one thing: it must modify "she."
Usage of "hopefully"
In the last forty years or so, controversy has arisen over the proper usage of the adverb hopefully.[1] Some grammarians objected when they first encountered constructions as "Hopefully, the sun will be shining tomorrow." Their complaint stems from the fact that the term "hopefully" dangles, and can be understood to describe either the speaker's state of mind, or the manner in which the sun will shine. It was no longer just an adverb modifying a verb, an adjective or another adverb as hitherto, but conveniently also one that modified the whole sentence, in order to convey the attitude of the speaker.
In common speech, "hopefully", when used in this modern fashion, is known as a sentence adverb (cf. "admittedly", "mercifully", "oddly"). For example, most listeners will interpret "Hopefully, John got home last night" as meaning that the speaker hopes that John arrived home last night, not that John got home last night in a hopeful manner. A colloquialism is an informal expression, that is, an expression not used in formal speech or writing. ...
In linguistics, a disjunct is a type of adverbial adjunct that expresses information that is not considered essential to the sentence it appears in, but which is considered to be the speakers or writers attitude towards, or descriptive statement of, the propositional content of the sentence. ...
One of the reasons that the sentence adverb usage seems more acceptable these days is that its semantics are reminiscent of the German hoffentlich ("it is to be hoped that") which implies (in the context of the first example) that the speaker hopes the sun will shine. Furthermore, it is because of their conciseness, avoiding the need to put into several words what can be said in one, that the use of sentence adverbs is establishing itself more and more in colloquial speech. Per Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins[2]: The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ...
Theodore M. Bernstein, was an editor at The New York Times. ...
No other word in English expresses that thought. In a single word we can say it is regrettable that (regrettably) or it is fortunate that (fortunately) or it is lucky that (luckily), and it would be comforting if there were such a word as hopably or, as suggested by Follett, hopingly, but there isn't. [...] In this instance nothing is to be lost—the word would not be destroyed in its primary meaning—and a useful, nay necessary term is to be gained. What had been expressed in lengthy adverbial constructions, such as "it is regrettable that …" or "it is fortunate that …", had of course always been shortened to the adverbs "regrettably" or "fortunately". Bill Bryson says, "... those writers who scrupulously avoid 'hopefully' in such constructions do not hesitate to use at least a dozen other words—'apparently', 'presumably', 'happily', 'sadly', 'mercifully', 'thankfully', and so on—in precisely the same way".[3] What has changed, however, in the controversy over "hopefully" being used for "he was hoping that ...", or "she was full of hope that ...", is that the original clause was transferred from the speaker, as a kind of shorthand to the subject itself, as though "it" had expressed the hope. ("Hopefully, the sun will be shining".) Although this still expressed the speaker's hope "that the sun will be shining" it may have caused a certain disorientation as to who was expressing what when it first appeared. As time passes, this controversy will fade as the usage becomes more and more accepted, especially since such adverbs as "mercifully", "gratefully", and "thankfully" are similarly used.
Merriam-Webster gives a usage note on its entry for "hopefully" in which the editors point out that the disjunct sense of the word dates to the early 18th century and had been in fairly widespread use since at least the 1930s. Objection to this sense of the word, they state, only became widespread in the 1960s. The editors note that this usage is "entirely standard".[4] Merriam-Webster, originally known as the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is a United States company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Websters An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). ...
Examples Misplaced modifiers have sometimes been used for humorous effect. A famous example of this is by Groucho Marx as Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding in the 1930 film, Animal Crackers: Groucho redirects here. ...
Year 1930 (MCMXXX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display 1930 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Animal Crackers is a 1930 comedy film, and one of the Marx Brothers most beloved and oft-quoted movies. ...
- "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I don't know."
Though, logically, Captain Spaulding would have been wearing the pajamas, the line plays on the grammatical possibility that the elephant was wearing his pajamas, owing to its misplaced modifier.
See also - Garden path sentence, a stylistic pitfall that causes confusion in a way similar to dangling modifiers.
- Adverbial, for sentence adverbials commenting on a whole sentence.
Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate that human beings process language one word at a time. ...
This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
References - ^ Kahn, John Ellison and Robert Ilson, Eds. The Right Word at the Right Time: A Guide to the English Language and How to Use It, pp. 27–29. London: The Reader's Digest Association Limited, 1985. ISBN 0-276-38439-3.
- ^ Bernstein, Theodore M. Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, p. 51. The Noonday Press, New York, 1971. ISBN 0-374-52315-0.
- ^ Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Bill Bryson, pp. 242, Broadway Books, New York, 2002, ISBN 0-7679-1043-5
- ^ "hopefully." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2007. http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=hopefully (15 Aug. 2007).
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