English poll!

[rowyn]

[Poll #1981252]

I have already overthought this question, so I'm not going to explain the background unless someone asks me to in the comments. I'm just curious what instinctive sense other people have on it.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That comma is important. -_-

[rowyn]

Agreed!

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Yes. Without the comma, the following clause is part of and describes "the boy."

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

The comma is what makes it clear. Mary, who is still the subject of the sentence, walks, laughing at the joke. The comma is clearly in between "boy" and "laughing at the joke," obliterating any thought that it might be a "boy laughing at the joke."

If there were no comma, my first thought was that it would be ambiguous, but actually I would assume it was the boy who was laughing. That said, it'd be an ugly sentence.

Another way to phrase this (if there's still concern):

Mary, laughing at the joke, walked over to the boy.

If the intent was to say that she was walking over specifically to the boy who was laughing at the joke (perhaps there were other boys in the vicinity who were NOT), then one might say:

Mary walked over to the boy who was laughing at the joke.

That takes more words, but as much as it's desirable to be brief, it defeats the purpose of removing words if it courts confusion.

Or, perhaps--

Mary walked over to the laughing boy.

This would, however, assume that it had already been established that there was some laughing going on, or we might wonder where in the world a laughing boy came from.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Mary laughed at the joke, and walked over to the boy?

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

That would paint a very clear picture, but the use of the gerund (-ing) in the first example would suggest to me that it was important to convey that she's laughing as she's walking.

"Mary laughed at the joke, and walked over to the boy," indicates that Mary did these two things (laughed, walked), but it doesn't emphasize that she necessarily did them at the same time. One might read it as having an implied "and then" (i.e., "Mary laughed at the joke, and then walked over to the boy") simply because of the sequence.

Now, it's possible that this simply DOES NOT MATTER in the greater scheme of things insofar as the storytelling goes. Who really cares if Mary is still laughing as she's walking? I wouldn't know without any more context on the story. ;)

[archangelbeth]

Or "Mary laughed at the joke as she walked over to the boy" if it has to be at the same time?

[rowyn]

One of the things that annoyed me about rephrasing to avoid the participle is that it's pretty much always going to add to the word count: you get at least an extra conjunction or preposition, and possibly another noun/pronoun. I am sure you understand about not wanting to inflate word count. :D

[archangelbeth]

Oh, strewth.

If you absolutely had to get past someone who was insisting on the other meaning, swap it around: "Laughing at the joke, Mary walked over to the boy." (But, honestly, I'd not have flagged the thing in the first place as being at all unclear.)

[rowyn]

You understand!

I'm not actually going to use this sentence anywhere; I wanted a sample sentence where nothing about the context would suggest who was laughing, so the reader's opinion would be solely based on word order and punctuation.

I actually have been looking at ways to reorder sentences to avoid this structure, but I was unconvinced it was worth the effort. Given the response to the poll, I'm even less convinced it's necessary. :)

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

I really can't see how it would be anything but the first thing. Or possibly the last, but that would be my problem and not yours... ;)

I *am* curious about the context, though.

[rowyn]

I use this construction a lot -- "subject verb object, subordinate clause" -- when I'm writing, in the belief that the subordinate clause modifies the subject, even if you put it after the object. But a panel on editing advice had warned authors to be careful of dangling participles, and that made me wonder if I was right about subordinate clauses always modifying the subject. Google gave contradictory answers -- the top hit for dangling participles says that the nearest antecedent noun is the one modified, while the OED webpage says it's the subject.

I figured a poll would be a good way of seeing what actual usage looked like, and if this was something that readers were likely to be confused about. The answer to those appears to be "it modifies the subject" and "no". :)

[alltoseek.livejournal.com]

I would've assumed Mary, without additional context, assuming that the writer, as so many nowadays, prefers their participles to dangle.

But technically it ought to refer to the the boy.

But to answer your poll, NO ONE LAUGHS AT GRAMMAR. NO ONE.

[rowyn]

Ah, that is the crux of the question! Is it a dangling participle if Mary is the one laughing? I deliberately phrased the statement to give no contextual clues: it makes equal amounts of sense for either the boy or Mary to be laughing. But 22 respondents so far picked Mary as the one laughing, and no one had the gut reaction of "it's the boy".

My belief -- and the Oxford English Dictionary backs me on this! -- is that a subordinate clause modifies the subject of the sentence, not the nearest antecedent noun.

But I did find a website that agrees with your take that it ought to be the boy: http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/WritingGuide/10dangpt.htm. It's the very first site Google yields when I do a search on "dangling participle".

But given that common usage and the Oxford English dictionary both follow the rule that "subordinate clauses modify the subject of the sentence", I'm going to side with them and say the USU webpage is in error here.

[whitefangedwolf.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that a participle becomes a dangling participle when it is not supposed to target the subject of the sentence.

In the sentence, "Mary walked over to the boy, laughing at the joke", the participle, "laughing", targets the subject, "Mary", so the sentence can be rearranged as "Mary, laughing at the joke, walked over to the boy" without changing the meaning. If the boy was supposed to be laughing, then "laughing" is a dangling participle. In that case, removing the comma makes the sentence "Mary walked over to the boy laughing at the joke", which attaches "laughing" to "boy" instead of "Mary".

[rowyn]

Yep, this appears to be the general understanding. Not sure where the USU page was coming from on this one.