The Last Piece of Theory on Present Participial Phrases

You're probably sick to death of listening to all the talk about the routine abuse of present participial phrases. Trust me, it could be worse. If we posted about this every time we rejected a sub for having too many of these errors, we'd have to rename the blog -ingtorrent.

But in all our talk about these pesky phrases, it occurs to me that we've never given you the final piece of theory. We explained that these phrases are adjective phrases. We talked about the nature of modifiers and how present participial phrases sometimes indicated weakness in the sentence's main clause. And, most recently, Alicia talked about using present participial phrases to signal concurrent actions.

Maybe you've already read these posts and drawn the conclusion I'm about to present. But just in case, and just so we're all clear on how these different bits of advice and theory work together, let's take a look at why these phrases must be concurrent and relevant to the main clause.

In the simple sentence,

The orange cat leaped onto the windowsill

we can all see that orange modifies cat. The cat's orange quality exists at the moment of leaping. In fact, we can assume the cat is orange at all times, barring unfortunate accidents with dye pots. Easy enough so far. But what happens when we replace that simple adjective with a present participle used as an adjective?

The hissing cat leaped onto the windowsill.

The act of hissing still describes the cat, and the act of hissing is still concurrent with the main action verb. Hissing is a state of being that exists during the totality of the leap. Hissing is not a discrete action all on its own. Or, I should say, it's not presented as such. If it were, it would be presented differently, perhaps,

The cat hissed and leaped onto the windowsill.

Then we would be describing a compound action (hissed and leaped) instead of describing a state of being (hissing) of a noun (cat) at the moment an action (leaped) occurs.

You with me so far? Verbs are actions. Adjectives describe qualities or states of being of a noun. And -- this is the main point -- the description of the noun must be simultaneous with the action. If the hissing and leaping occurred in sequence, one first and then the next, you would have to separate them in the sentence, perhaps with an adverb,

The cat hissed and then leaped onto the windowsill.

(Then is an adverb modifying leaped.)

Or you might shift the hissing into an adverb phrase,

After hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.
While hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

These phrases are adverbial in nature because they describe the time elements involved with the actions. They don't qualify the essential nature of the cat. They qualify the timeline. Because adverbs modify verbs, right? Verbs usually lay out the timeline for prose actions, so any time you need to clarify sequencing, you might need adverbs or adverb phrases. And these adverb phrases are not the same as,

Hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

Because this doesn't tell us diddly-squat about the sequencing. All we've done in this sentence is elaborate on an adjective (which modifies a noun, not a verb). (Forgive me if this sounds like harping. I'm trying to make this as clear as I can, and this seems to require some repetition of concepts.)

Remember that in the sentence,

The hissing cat leaped onto the windowsill.

the adjective hissing modified the noun cat. All we have done here is add a prepositional phrase to provide more information about the hissing. It's not just any hissing. It's hissing at a dog. But it still describes the essential nature of the cat.

The hissing at the dog cat leaped onto the windowsill.

This sentence is structurally awkward for a whole lot of reasons we won't get into here. But leaving aside all that awkwardness (and the punctuation issue, also a separate matter), the point is that hissing still modifies cat, and at the dog still modifies hissing, and modifiers still go next to the words they modify. You could use punctuation to get around the awkwardness,

The hissing-at-the-dog cat leaped onto the windowsill.

Or you could shift the phrase into an introductory position,

Hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

The cat's hissing-at-the-dog nature exists at the moment of the leap. And this is why present participial phrases, which are adjectival in nature, are simultaneous with the main actions of the sentence.

When Alicia was talking about causal and other connections between the present participial phrase and the main verb, I think she was mainly trying to make a point about relevance. We could describe the cat in lots of different ways.

Staring with its blue eyes and hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

Now there's a craptastic phrase for you. I had to use one that talked about what the cat is doing with its eyes, because these are generally weak phrases, far less meaningful than dynamic actions like hissing and leaping. Using less meaningful (or even irrelevant) phrases will dilute the impact of the sentence. The cat may very well have staring blue eyes for the duration of the leap. But so what? The fact that it's eyes are blue doesn't give us important information about the actions underway. And the staring -- well, anyone who has been around a cat knows they are champion starers. They stare because they're bored, content, hungry, etc., etc. But hissing only happens in response to a threat, so hissing gives us a more clear description of the cat's state of being at the moment of the jump.

Do we all understand this? Any questions? Got any sample sentences with participial phrases you want us to tackle? Post them in the comments if you do.

Theresa,
tempted to bore us further with another similar post on past participial phrases