A Word, Please: For less confusion, seek the modifier’s noun
Not long ago, I used as an example in this column “Having already missed two mortgage payments, Jane asked her mother if she could loan her some money.” I was making the point that editors usually prefer “lend” to “loan” as a verb, but reader Catherine spotted another interesting issue here.
“Reading that sentence quickly and casually, I am not sure who missed the mortgage payments, Jane or her mother, and who is going to lend money to whom,” Catherine wrote. “Maybe this would be clearer: ‘Jane had missed two mortgage payments, so she asked her mother to lend her some money.’”
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Yes, Catherine’s rewrite is better, eliminating all possibility of confusion. But is it necessary? Might the sentence be airtight already? The answer is yes, assuming that both the writer and the reader understand modifying phrases, in general, and dangling participles, in particular.
Take a look at this sentence: “Speeding down the country road, the oak tree seemed to pop up out of nowhere.” Clearly, something’s wacky here. It sounds almost as though the oak tree was speeding. But to understand the mechanics of this problem sentence, as well as how to fix it, we need to look at the introductory phrase: “speeding down the country road.”
This unit is called a participial modifying phrase. It’s one of several types of phrases that can work like adjectives or adverbs. The “participial” part of the name refers to the fact that the whole phrase is built upon “speeding,” which a participle — a form of a verb.
The “modifying” part of its name refers to the fact that it’s not really functioning as a verb. It’s doing the job of an adjective, which modifies a noun.
If you think of the whole phrase “speeding down the country road” as an adjective, you start to see what’s wrong with our sentence. The problem is captured in the question: Which noun, exactly, is this adjective phrase modifying? The way it just dangles there leaves only one possible culprit: the oak tree.
Consciously or not, readers expect that the noun nearest to the adjective phrase is the one being modified. That’s why you could get away with saying “I’m going to dinner with my pretty wife, brother and father,” but you couldn’t get the same message across if you moved the nouns around: “my pretty father, brother and wife.”
Readers expect you to put the adjective phrase right next to the noun or nouns you mean it to modify. That’s why my sentence about Jane and her mom was grammatically airtight.
“Having already missed two mortgage payments, Jane asked her mother if she could loan her some money” puts Jane closest to the participial modifying phrase. And I’d bet that Catherine’s confusion wasn’t a real problem she was having but simply an example of the questions that arise when an inquisitive mind focuses on grammar and syntax.
Our oak tree sentence is a little kookier because the real noun modified by our adjective is nowhere to be found: “Speeding down the country road, the oak tree seemed to pop up out of nowhere.” Who or what, exactly, is speeding? We don’t know because the writer didn’t mention it. Perhaps this means, “Speeding down the country road, Josh struck an oak tree that seemed to pop up out of nowhere.” Or perhaps, “Speeding down the country road, the rusty Ford pickup smashed into an oak tree that seemed to pop up out of nowhere.”
In both those rewrites, the noun being modified is as close as it can be to the phrase modifying it. That was the case with my sentence about Jane and her mom, too. And as long as the writer understands this and the reader trusts his instincts, misplaced modifying phrases like the dreaded dangling participle are never a problem.
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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.