Forum member Gerry Galacio presented another seriously flawed sentence construction in his June 23, 2014 posting in the Forum (
Dangling modifier from Starweek; Duke University article on dangling modifiers). The sentence, from the companion weekly magazine of a leading Philippine broadsheet, reads as follows:
Being a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio F. Aguinaldo, people expect me to know much about this house which was built in 1845 by my great great grandparents, Trinidad Valerio Famy and Carlos Jamir Aguinaldo, a former gobernadorcillo of the town of Kawit.
Gerry Galacio identified the frontline participial phrase “being a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio F. Aguinaldo” as a dangling modifier, but based on my June 28, 2014 posting in the Forum (
Re: Misplaced modifiers in Inquirer and Rappler articles), I must say that it’s actually a misplaced modifier. This is because that participial phrase succeeds in effecting the modification of the main clause, even if in a faulty way because of the subject-verb disagreement between the singular “descendant” and the plural “people.”
In my column in
The Manila Times last June 28, 2014, I then joined Gerry Galacio in inviting readers to do the exercise of rewriting that sentence to get rid of that misplaced modifier.
TWO SUGGESTED ATTEMPTS TO GET RID OF THAT MISPLACED MODIFIER:On June 28, reader Jun Pagulayan posted this response in the Times:It should read this way:
“Being a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio F. Aguinaldo, I am expected to know much about this house which was built in 1845 by my great great grandparents, Trinidad Valerio Famy and Carlos Jamir Aguinaldo, a former gobernadorcillo of the town of Kawit.”
My reply to Jun Pagulayan’s rewrite:Jun, your rewrite is good. It’s a grammatically airtight construction that neatly corrected the misplaced modification in the original sentence, but then it also got rid of the noun “people,” which was the subject of the main clause. Now the reader won’t know who expects the first-person “I” to know much about the house. Maybe you should try getting “people” back into the picture.
Forum member Miss Mae e-mailed me this response last June 30:Dear Mr. Carillo,
Can I split the original sentence into two so that it would read as follows?
“People expect me to know much about this house, being a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo. It was built in 1845 by my great grandparents, Trinidad Valerio Famy and Carlos Jamir Aguinaldo, a former gobernadorcillo of the town of Kawit.”
My reply to Miss Mae:Splitting the original sentence into two as you’ve done is a step in the right direction, for it simplifies the rather longwinded sentence and makes it easier to read. But I’m afraid that it isn’t effective at all in properly positioning the misplaced modifying phrase, “being a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo.” As it is now, that phrase has become a dangling modifier, for it fails to modify the noun “house” (the subject most proximate to it) and neither could it find a logical subject in the main clause. Keep in mind that it is grammatically wrong to assume the objective pronoun “me” as its subject; indeed, only the subjective first-person “I” could be the logical subject of that modifying phrase, but then that “I” is nowhere to be found in the main clause.
My suggested fix for that misplaced modifying phrase:The problem with the original sentence construction is that at the expense of clarity, the writer seems to have deliberately avoided starting the sentence with the first-person “I.” He did this by using the participial phrase “being a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio F. Aguinaldo” to start the sentence so he need not use “I” up front. This construction wrongly and illogically forces the noun “people” in the main clause to be its subject. Indeed, taking recourse to such frontline modifying phrases is a very common mistake of writers who have been taught the wrongheaded old-school notion that starting a sentence with “I” is bad, egotistical writing.
Now see how natural and effortlessly readable that original sentence becomes once it acknowledges and uses without any hesitation the first-person “I” as its true, legitimate subject:
“I am a fourth generation descendant of Gen. Emilio F. Aguinaldo, so people expect me to know much about this house that was built in 1845 by my great great grandparents, Trinidad Valerio Famy and Carlos Jamir Aguinaldo, a former gobernadorcillo of the town of Kawit.”
This time we have a straightforward, no-nonsense construction that gives no room for a misplaced or a dangling modifying phrase to confound the reader.
