Name and rules of this construction: "A somber man privately, Johnson had an acid humor."

Question

I'm reading a book right now that in my opinion overuses a certain construct. It's used so much that it distracts from the content.

Some examples:

Eccentric and egotistical, Berkeley was not so much interested in dance steps as he was in camera movement.

And:

A somber man privately, Johnson had an acid humor, quite different at the dinner table … from what reached the screen.

And:

Solely a screen actor, Gary Cooper mastered his craft so that he knew exactly how to react for the camera.

1. Is there a term for this construct?

I'm thinking maybe it's some kind of topicalized apposition? So you could start with

Gary Cooper, solely a screen actor, mastered his craft so that he knew exactly how to react for the camera.

and then pull the appositive phrase to the front to make the sentence interesting:

Solely a screen actor, Gary Cooper mastered his craft so that he knew exactly how to react for the camera.

2. What is the relation between the phrases?

There does seem to be some relationship between the phrases in the particular constructs I quoted: Johnson's somberness and acid humor obviously contrast one another; Cooper's mastered the specific craft of the screen actor; I suppose Berkeley's eccentricity accounts for his interests. That last one's less clear to me.

But is this kind of relationship a requirement? Say I combine two phrases:

A big man, John Doe loved the color yellow.

Could that just be one way of expressing two unrelated things in one sentence, or would the reader expect them to have a bearing on each other?

I'm curious about the "rules" (whether written down somewhere, or the conventional usage, or your intuitions) of the relationship between the phrases in this construct.

Answer 1

First, you shouldn't start with apposition; apposition is not a starting place, but the result of relative clause pruning.

• My son the doctor is coming for dinner = My son, who is a doctor, is coming for dinner.

In the case of the construction you ask about, it's not a relative clause that's being pruned, but an adverbial subordinate clause. A starting point for Eccentric and egotistical ... (with parenthesized material pruned) might be

• (Because/Although/While/Similarly,/<Subordinating conjunction>
  • Berkeley is/was) eccentric and egotistical, ...

This is rather like participial constructions, except the only verb in sight is the predicate adjective auxiliary be, which is totally predictable and therefore deleted, along with the equally predictable subject, leaving only the adjectives, but keeping the clausal intonation (whence the comma), and leaving the conjunction unspecified.

And giving rise to "dangling participles" like

Sitting on the fence, my mother saw three cats fighting.

As you suspect, the identity of the conjunction that would be appropriate is up to the listener to calculate from (their knowledge of (the speaker's knowledge of)) the context. So if you can't guess what connection might exist between being eccentric and egotistical, on the one hand, and having an interest in camera movement on the other, then for sure you might not be able to see what the speaker's getting at.

This kind of calculation is Pragmatic -- situational, dependent on the goals and effects of speech -- and not a part of a syntactic construction, or even semantics. It's all inference, though there are some guidelines.