Sentence Correction

lunarpower wrote:

ansumania wrote:

lunarpower wrote:

ansumania wrote:Ron,

you pointed out that if we are using 'present participle' as modifier , it can only refer to subject and not object.

not for all present participles -- just for present participles that follow commas.
(note that i am careful to describe, on essentially every post where i discuss this phenomenon, that that's the rule for COMMA + -ING modifiers.)

the president participles in this problem don't follow commas, so this rule does not apply here.

Ron,

I thought Stacey treated the ', having been ' as the ', ing' modifier while explaining this....

This is an extract from her reply

"The preceding clause uses a pronoun as the subject ("it was revived by Segovia") and that pronoun refers to "classical guitar." So the modifier technically modifies "classical guitar revived by Segovia": that is, the classical guitar revived by Segovia was won over by the instrument's sound. The guitar... not Segovia. No good."

pl. provide your thoughts. Now I am a bit confused.

in that question, everything that stacey said is correct, and, yes, that's an example of a COMMA -ING modifier.
you can think of such modifiers as pertaining to BOTH the subject and action of the preceding clause, actually; the subject has to be the agent of whatever action is represented by the -ING form, but that action must also be intimately related to the action of the preceding clause.
for instance:
John scored 95 percent on his most recent exam, bringing his average up to 91 percent for the semester.
--> note that "bringing" applies to the SUBJECT, "John"
--> note also that "bringing" correctly modifies the ACTION of the preceding clause, since the action of scoring 95 percent on his most recent exam was what caused the average to go up to 91.

--

the confusion here is between two types of "subject":

1) with COMMA -ING modifiers, the modifier modifies the SUBJECT (and action) of the PRECEDING CLAUSE.

BUT
2) with NO COMMA -ING modifiers, the preceding noun is the AGENT OF THE ACTION DESCRIBED BY -ING.
in this case, whether that noun is a grammatical subject (i.e., the subject of some clause) is actually immaterial.
here are two examples:
the shirt hanging on the hook is yours --> the shirt is what is hanging (agent of the action). in this case, "shirt" is also the subject of the clause.
i'll take the shirt hanging on the hook --> again, the shirt is what is hanging (agent of the action). in this case, though, "shirt" is not a grammatical subject -- it's actually an object.

lunarpower wrote:

ansumania wrote:Thanks a lot Ron for your reply. I guess now I understood. It always refers to the agent (which is considered to be the subject , though it might not be the real subject at times as far as the actual sentence is concerned. Pl. acknowledge so that I can be sure.
Again, I have read your posts regarding the use of 'past partciple' as the modifier.
Pl. clarify in this example.
1- Based on the reports , he conducted the experiment.: This sentence is wrong as we are using a ', ed ' modifier which should refer to the object .
2- He conducted the experiment based on the report.: This sentence is correct as there is no comma and the prepositional phrase correctly refers to the preceding noun 'experiment'. Pl. let me know if I went wrong in my analysis.

#1 -- yes, this would be incorrect. according to this version, "he" is "based on the reports"; no matter what the context is, that could not possibly make any sense.

#2 -- this could technically be correct if the experiment itself were based on the report, but that seems like somewhat of a stretch in terms of context.
in the context given, it seems as though the way in which the experiment is conducted is what's based on the report. if that's what you mean, then this sentence is written incorrectly; the easiest fix in that case would be to replace "based on" with "according to" (or some other, similar construction).