Timeline for Is this a dangling participle and can it be fixed elegantly?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Jul 26, 2022 at 19:22 | comment | added | LPH | @Lambie Please read the title of the question, first, and then, very carefully, your own answer, before you made the edit no 1, and finally this answer: english.stackexchange.com/a/592554/349876. | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 15:19 | comment | added | LPH | What would be attached here, that is not dangling? "Preparation"? Certainly not; it has to be the whole expression, that is "Three years in preparation". (2/2) | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 15:19 | comment | added | LPH | "in the making" is a prepositional phrase introduced by the prep. "in"; necessarily, it modifies a noun phrase, which has to be "three years". So the modifier is "three years in the making", not "making". The noun "making" could be some other one that has no ing-ending, as in this sentence: "Three years in preparation , The Love Wagon was a completely New Jersey work, artistically, creatively, financially, and in terms of production.". (google.fr/books/edition/Past_and_Promise/…) (1/2) | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 14:47 | comment | added | OpenAI was the last straw | Agree with @Lambie. You're missing the forest for the trees here. Sure, it's not a participle, but it's still dangling, since its referent is nowhere to be found in the rest of the sentence. Saying "no, it's not a dangling participle because it's not a participle," is technically true, but misses the point of the question. | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 14:43 | comment | added | Lambie | It is a dangling modifier. | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 14:31 | comment | added | LPH | @tchrist Most likely, they have not yet become aware to any significant extent of the importance of grammar. | |
| Jul 26, 2022 at 14:25 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | Yes, making is quite clearly a noun here, as evidenced by the use of the. I don’t know why some people think it’s a participle or a gerund, but I suspect they’re using far more casual definitions of those respective terms than one would wish for, perhaps ones based on morphology alone rather than on syntax. If it were an actual gerund then you would be able to say either ❌ in the making better movies or ❌ in the making movies better, but you cannot say those because both are ungrammatical; it would have to be in the making of better movies, connecting two NPs with a preposition. | |
| Jul 25, 2022 at 23:12 | history | answered | LPH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |