Author Topic: The pitfalls of not providing sentences with a clear subject  (Read 2590 times)

Joe Carillo

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The pitfalls of not providing sentences with a clear subject
« on: October 10, 2014, 11:41:58 AM »
Question e-mailed by Doris Cheng from Hong Kong (October 9, 2014):

Could you please tell me which of the sentences below is correct and why? What’s the problem with the sentences that are wrong?

1. “Having eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason to become ill.”
2. “Having eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason for me to become ill.”
3: “Since I have eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason for me to become ill.”

My reply to Doris:

Here’s my analysis of the following three sentence constructions that you presented:

1. “Having eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason to become ill.”
2. “Having eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason for me to become ill.”
3: “Since I have eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason for me to become ill.”




Both Sentences 2 and 3 are grammatically and structurally correct, but Sentence 1 is grammatically and structurally faulty because its subject is nowhere to be found.

In Sentence 2, the main clause “there was no reason for me to become ill” is introduced and  modified by the participial phrase “having eaten Chinese food many times before.” That sentence doesn’t provide a specific subject, but it works properly because the pronoun “me, which serves as the object of the preposition in the main clause, makes it implicit that the subject of both the main clause and the modifying phrase is the first-person “I.”

In Sentence 3, the main clause “there was no reason for me to become ill” is modified by the prepositional phrase “since I have eaten Chinese food many times before,” which serves as a subordinate clause. The sentence works properly because this subordinate clause explicitly identifies the first-person “I” as its subject, and the presence of the pronoun “me” in the main clause makes it explicit as well that its antecedent subject is the same first-person “I” in the subordinate clause. I would say that if the three options above are given in a multiple-choice test, Sentence 3 would arguably be the best answer.

In the case of Sentence 1, “Having eaten Chinese food many times before, there was no reason to become ill,” it fails both grammatically and structurally in the absence of a clear subject in both the main clause and subordinate clause. The faulty construction makes the participial phrase “having eaten Chinese food many times before” a dangling modifier, unable to find a clear subject to modify anywhere in the whole sentence.

There are two common fixes for this kind of sentence that has a dangling modifying phrase. One is to reconstruct it by clearly using the first-person “I” as explicit subject, as in “I have eaten Chinese food many times before so there was no reason to become ill” (the construction is now a compound sentence using the coordinating conjunction “so”) or “Having eaten Chinese food many times before, I had no reason to become ill” (the subject “I” is made explicit in the main clause).

A third fix is the same construction used by Sentence 2 above, where the pronoun “me” as the object of the preposition in the main clause makes it implicit that the subject of the modifying phrase is the first-person “I.” Even if it is grammatically and structurally defensible, however, I think this slippery and not-so-clearcut construction can confuse a lot of nonnative English speakers. I would therefore advise learners of English to avoid that type of construction until they become sufficiently conversant with the intricacies of the language.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2018, 01:36:12 AM by Joe Carillo »