Past Participial Modifiers

Okay, so we might have discussed present participial phrases here a time or two. (cough 19 cough) Now we'll talk about past participial phrases, which are exactly the same as present participial phrases except they use past participles instead of present participles.

Past participle:
evaluated

Present participle:
evaluating

Both forms can be used to conjugate verbs. The present form can be used as a noun (technically, a gerund).  And both can be used as adjectives.

Evaluating the competition, the coach looked worried.
Evaluated for speed, the other team posted record times.

In both examples, the introductory phrases -- adjectives, remember -- modify the nouns they go next to. Because that's what we do with modifiers. We put them next to the words they modify.

Just like a present participial phrase, a past participial phrase can be misplaced:

The other team ate sandwiches, evaluated for speed.

This implies the sandwiches are evaluated for speed. It is a misplaced modifier because it has not been placed next to the word it modifies.

The sandwiches had too much mustard, evaluated for speed.

This is a dangling modifier because it cannot attach to any noun in that sentence. Neither the sandwiches nor the mustard are being evaluated for speed.

And if you think those examples look bizarre and funny, well, they are meant to. But so will every other botched PPP once you learn to spot this kind of error.

Theresa

This is about a past participle! Change of pace!

I came across this line in an article about LBJ (who I have grown to think of as a tragic hero in the Greek tradition, with his greatest strength-- the ability to make people compromise-- leading to his downfall-- the Vietnam War):
"Johnson would have dressed these people down in public and then drank all the liquor in their cabinet."

Drank or drunk? To me, it's drunk (would have drunk) because it is the conditional-- he didn't actually drink. But for a second, before it flew out of my mind, I thought I had a reason why "drank" is right. Now it's gone, but I remember that at some moment, I had a blinding insight.

Poor me. My blinding insights are so often lost during the blinding.

Anyway, does anyone have a good argument for "drank" there? Or are we all agreed -- conditional tense (would have) takes past participle (drunk)?
Alicia

Logical thinking

I was writing a line:
They had already closen ranks.

It sounded right, but looked wrong. Took me a while to notice that while "broken" is the past participle for "break," and "chosen" the past participle for "choose," the past participle for "close" is ... closed.

I work with a lot of ESL (English as a Second Language) students, and they make these perfectly logical mistakes all the time. You know, why NOT bring brang brung, huh? After all, there's sing sang sung!

Not great thoughts here, only just a gentle admonition to professors everywhere-- only native speakers can be expected to get all the illogical parts of our language right. (English isn't any more illogical than any other language, btw.) So ESL writers shouldn't be overly penalized for these little fluency errors. This sort of mistake does not make them bad writers. Content, sentence construction, thematic unity matter more than whether they write "in" rather than "on" in some idiom.

That said, ESL writers should-- until they are very confident -- ask a native speaker to read over ALOUD every draft to catch those little errors. And the reader doesn't have to be trained in editing. They should be able to catch and help correct most of the little fluency issues, and that will make for an easier read by the target audience.

(But "closen" ought to be a word. :)
Alicia