March 24, 2007

Dangling in court


Don Piraro's Bizarro cartoon of 3/23/07 depicts a scene in "Physics Court": the judge is pronouncing his decision in the case of a defendant who is dangling in front of him in mid-air, about a foot off the floor:

Yes, that's a dangling modifier.  The subject of the participial modifier is supplied by the direct object in the main clause, not by the subject; it is the defendant, not the judge, who has gone up and not come down.  The question is: who's responsible for the dangler?


Piraro presented us with a similar puzzle about a year ago, in a cartoon depicting a wedding ceremony, with the minister pronouncing:

And now, having each recited the vows they have written themselves, we all realize the importance of education.

Back then, Mark Liberman offered three hypotheses about the source of that dangler, and the readers voted:

The cartoonist intended us to think that the minister dangled the modifier unwittingly while sincerely praising the bride and groom: 21%

The cartoonist intended us to think that the minister dangled the modifier on purpose as an ironic way to criticize the bride and groom: 15%

The cartoonist didn't understand that there is a linguistic problem in the caption: 60%

(Other interpretation: 5%)

By a wide margin, the voters thought that Piraro just didn't see any linguistic problem.

The corresponding options for the "Physics Court" cartoon are:

The cartoonist intended us to think the judge dangled the modifier unwittingly while pronouncing his decision; this is just the way the judge talks.

The cartoonist intended us to think the judge dangled the modifier on purpose as a play on the verb dangle.

The cartoonist didn't understand that there is a linguistic problem in the caption.

For the first option, the cartoonist himself might have been joking, or maybe he made no (conscious) connection between dangling modifiers and dangling in the air.

I'm inclined to go with the voters on the wedding cartoon and say that Piraro simply saw no issue with the participial modifier: the sentence is about the defendant, and the "I hereby find" is just part of a legal formula, not a shift to the judge himself as topic, so that "having gone up and refused to go down" is to be understood as being predicated of the defendant, not the judge.

Still, the judge's pronouncement gave me pause, maybe because so many danglers involve predications about the speaker or writer; we're forever talking about ourselves.  Here are a few first-person examples from my collection, all with having (as in the two Bizarro cartoons):

(Z3.24) ... it is the Quirk grammar which (having compiled its index) has occupied a worryingly large proportion of my own life... (linguist David Crystal, in a review of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; example supplied to me by Rodney Huddleston)

(Z3.125) Never before has an article hit so close to home.  Was it the timing, having lost my mother to lung cancer three months ago? (letter to the NYT Magazine, 8/21/05, p. 8, from Dorothy Coffey of New Brunswick NJ)

(Z3.198) Having been away from postcard preparation for some three weeks, a huge backlog had accumulated.  (from my own pen, 3/19/07.  There was no preceding linguistic context; this was the first sentence in a postcard message.  I DID notice it right away.)

In contrast, the wedding cartoon has a third-person modifier, and the court cartoon a second-person one -- while in both cartoons the subject of the main clause is a first-person pronoun.  So we're doubly inclined to interpret these modifiers, on first reading, as first-person: we generally look to the subject, and (if we read generously) we should always be prepared for a first-person interpretation.  That turns out to be clearly not the intended interpretation, but it will take a lot of us a moment to work it all out.

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 24, 2007 11:17 AM