A dangling modifier (also known as a dangling participle or illogical participle) is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle. A writer may use a dangling modifier intending to modify a subject while word order may imply that the modifier describes an object, or vice versa.
An example of a dangling modifier appears in the sentence "Turning the corner, a handsome school building appeared". The modifying clause Turning the corner describes the behavior of the narrator, but the narrator is only implicit in the sentence. The sentence could be misread as the turning action attaching either to the handsome school building or to nothing at all. As another example, in the sentence "At the age of eight, my family finally bought a dog", the modifier At the age of eight is dangling. It is intended to specify the narrator's age when the family bought the dog, but the narrator is again only implicitly a part of the sentence. It could be read as the family was eight years old when it bought the dog, or even that the dog was eight when it was bought.
Dangling-modifier clauses
As an adjunct, a modifier clause is normally at the beginning or the end of a sentence and usually attached to the subject of the main clause. However, when the subject is missing or the clause attaches itself to another object in a sentence, the clause is seemingly "hanging" on nothing or on an inappropriate noun. It thus "dangles", as in these sentences:
In the first sentence, the adjunct clause may at first appear to modify "the trees", the subject of the sentence. However, it actually modifies the speaker of the sentence, who is not explicitly mentioned. In the second sentence, the adjunct may at first appear to modify "the sun", the subject of the sentence. Presumably, there is another, human subject who did reach the station as the sun was coming out, but this subject is not mentioned in the text. In both cases, whether the intended meaning is obscured or not may depend on context - if the previous sentences clearly established a subject, then it may be obvious who was walking down Main Street or reaching the station. But if left alone, they may be unclear if the reader takes the subject as an unknown observer; or misleading if a reader somehow believed the trees were walking down the street or the sun traveled to the station.
Many style guides of the 20th century consider dangling participles ungrammatical and incorrect. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style states that "A participle phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject". The 1966 book Modern American Usage: A Guide, started by Wilson Follett and finished by others, agrees: "A participle at the head of a sentence automatically affixes itself to the subject of the following verb – in effect a requirement that the writer either make his [grammatical] subject consistent with the participle or discard the participle for some other construction". However, this prohibition has been questioned; more descriptivist authors consider that a dangling participle is only problematic when there is actual ambiguity. One of Follett's examples is "Leaping to the saddle, his horse bolted", but a reader is unlikely to be genuinely confused and think that the horse was leaping into a saddle rather than an implicit rider; The Economist questioned whether the "clumsy examples" of the style guides proved much. Many respected and successful writers have used dangling participles without confusion; one example is Virginia Woolf whose work includes many such phrases, such as "Lying awake, the floor creaked" (in Mrs Dalloway) or "Sitting up late at night it seems strange not to have more control" (in The Waves).The article cites: Shakespeare's Richard II includes a dangling modifier as well.
Absolute constructions
Dangling participles are similar to clauses in absolute constructions, but absolute constructions are considered uncontroversial and grammatical. The difference is that a participle phrase in an absolute construction is not semantically attached to any single element in the sentence. A participle phrase is intended to modify a particular noun or pronoun, but in a dangling participle, it is instead erroneously attached to a different noun or to nothing; whereas in an absolute clause, is not intended to modify any noun at all, and thus modifying nothing is the intended use. An example of an absolute construction is: The weather being beautiful, we plan to go to the beach today.