Clik here to view.
The context of danglers
What follows is an abstract for an academic conference (explanation to come) on “dangling modifiers” in context. This is only an abstract, with a 200-word limit and no space for a bibliography (though...
View ArticleClik here to view.
as a SPAR
From a few weeks ago, Armistead Maupin, interviewed on NPR about Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage: A lot of pundits have been kind of analyzing, oh, what does it mean and why did he do...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dangling in the comics
Via Bert Vaux on Facebook, this Cyanide and Happiness cartoon (from 10/24/10): Putting aside the matter of paternal-filial relationships, there’s a (possible) syntactic point here (which is why Vaux...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stray books
For bibliophiles, this Incidental Comics cartoon, by Grant Snider, of 8/21/12: As someone who lives amidst piles of books, with more coming in all the time, the cartoon speaks to me. [Yes, that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dangler rage
It’s been a while since I posted about the absolutist (vs. the contextualist) position on subjectless predicational adjuncts requiring a referent for the missing subject (SPARs, for short), namely that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annals of cataphora
From the Economist of 12/3/11, p. 43, in “Marijuana in California and Colorado: Highs and laws” [the magazine is fond of jokey titles], after a long first paragraph about medical marijuana boom in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Possessive controller for SPAR
From NPR’s Morning Edition on the 17th, in the story “Farmers Cautious of Drought-Resistant Seeds”: Z4.72. Like many Iowa farmers, [Gary] Plunkett’s corn harvest numbers have gyrated … Some usage...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dance with the one that’s nearest?
On today’s Morning Edition on NPR, in the story “Without Heat, Sandy Victims ['victims of the storm Sandy', not 'victims who are covered with sand'] Guard Their Homes”: He’s living in a house that was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A split-antecedent dangler
In ad copy for the Michael Lucas raunchy gay porn film The Wetter the Better, this summary of some hot-hot man-on-man action (not perhaps to everyone’s taste, but this posting is about syntax and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Another split antecedent dangler
Back in January I looked at a racy dangler in final position in its clause, where the referent for the missing subject was picked up from a combination of the subject of the clause and an oblique...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The apostrophe and a non-dangler
Katy Steinmetz on the TIME blog yesterday, in “Say It Aint So: The Movement to Kill the Apostrophe: On National Punctuation Day, here’s a look at efforts to obliterate the apostrophe and unleash a Wild...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On the dangler watch
A regular theme on this blog looks at “dangling modifiers” that on no reasonable grounds should some of them be treated as ungrammatical. Here are two cases, of different types. To recap from numerous...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why is this so hard to process?
From Chris Waigl, passed on by Chris Hansen: The problem begins with the subject, a longboat full of Vikings. The (syntactic) head of this phrase is certainly longboat (and that’s what determines...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Book notice: Visual Language of Comics
Arrived yesterday, Neil Cohn’s The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images (Bloomsbury, 2013). Central thesis: drawings and sequential images are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The power of the Subject Rule
Over on ADS-L yesterday, Wilson Gray reported the following example from his reading: (X) A nine-year-old boy is being hailed a hero for saving his mother’s life after being struck by lightning....
View ArticleSkip to the important bit
From reader Joshua Bischof in e-mail on the 21st (boldface highlights the example sentence, call it (1); italics and underlining mark off important elements in (1)): I just got this email from the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
after-SPARs
A SPAR message from reader Josh Bischof, with this bulletin from the internet: From Ragan’s PR Daily “Ultimate grammar cheat sheet” by Brendan Brown on 12/6/17: “6 grammar errors that can affect your...
View ArticleReturn to Dangle City
It’s been a long time since my last “dangling modifier” — non-default SPAR — posting (on 3/15 in “giving a speech on drugs”, according to my records). Now, from Josh Bischof on the 23rd, this excerpt...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Resources: dangler examples
Having worked on non-canonical SPARS — called dangling modifiers (or danglers, for short) on Usage Street — for several decades now, my files of SPAR examples have piled up alarmingly. I’ve cited a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
As a Business Professional, …
On the SPAR patrol, this message in my e-mail yesterday: I balked on that first sentence, which I understood, as it unfolded, as conveying that the writer was a business professional (or, as they would...
View Article
