Everything you wanted to know about danglers but were too afraid to ask

There's been a little kerfuffle lately over danglers. Steven Pinker, who is a noted linguist, said in an article in The Guardian that some dangling modifiers are OK to use — in fact, according to him, they're not even ungrammatical.

What are dangling modifiers, or "danglers" for short, you ask? In a nutshell, a dangler is a little phrase — not a complete sentence — that is used at the start of a sentence to describe something, but that something is not the subject doing the main action of the sentence. Since dangling modifiers don't attach to what comes right after them, they "dangle." The result is that they can be read as describing the subject of the sentence when they actually don't, which can be pretty funny, and we must not be unintentionally funny when we are writing.

Danglers can use present participles:

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They can use past participles:

They can use prepositional phrases:

They can use other kinds of modifier, too:

Obviously sentences such as these are a little problematic. But, according to Pinker — as well as a number of others, including Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log — there are danglers that are perfectly fine. Granted, many danglers are very snicker-worthy because they're ambiguous, but ambiguous is not the same as ungrammatical. There are many perfectly grammatical sentences that are ambiguous — for example, "He asked his son to comb his hair." (Whose hair, son's or dad's?)

Not everything that is ambiguous (and funny) is a dangler, either. Modifiers can be awkwardly placed in other ways: "I saw a boat strolling by the lake." "Scientists have found a chemical that can increase sex drive in spaghetti sauce." "He shot an elephant in his pajamas." These are ambiguously placed modifiers, but not danglers.

So what could make a dangler acceptable? Let's take a look at some kinds of danglers that are used all the time without anyone complaining about them:

The last example gives the real clue here. All of these are functioning like sentence adverbs. A sentence adverb is a word such as seriously, frankly, luckily, hypothetically, technically, and — although some peevers hate this one for no good reason — hopefully, used at the start of a sentence to give a tone, attitude, comment, or setting for the whole sentence. As it happens, adverbial constructions can involve things other than adverbs. You can also use participle phrases, prepositional phrases, and similar constructions to modify verbs… or to modify the whole setting or presentation of a sentence, as we do in cases such as the above.

We can change those example sentences just a little to make them a bit more obviously snicker-worthy, keeping the syntax as it was:

You can certainly deliberately read those in ways other than they're probably intended. Does that make them grammatically wrong? No, the grammar is the same. They're just more ambiguous. They could be rewritten — but not because of bad grammar, just because (in case you missed it) we must not be unintentionally funny.

So, having established that sentence adverbials of those sorts are not grammatically improper, let's look at some sentences of the kind criticized as having danglers that really aren't ambiguous. Tell me whether you could really misinterpret these:

I really do think we all know that "it" was not heading out, "this test" was not looking, "it" was not what was or wasn't going into too much depth, "the knives" were not the things possessing the intention of saving time, and we're not suggesting "they" could be mistakes outside of a nutshell. The only real difference between these ones and the acceptable examples above is that they're not using well-established phrases that we have come to accept. In short, the judgment about their grammaticality is really a judgment of whether they're idiomatic.

Could the sentences be rewritten? Everything can be rewritten. That's irrelevant to questions of grammaticality. The question for good writing is "Could they be rewritten for greater effectiveness?" The answer, when it comes to "danglers," is not always "yes." Sometimes words would need to be added to pacify the peevers without adding clarity; sometimes the conversational tone would have to be altered.

So… go or no go with sentence-adverb danglers? If you're writing for an audience of grammatical vivisectionists, you work is cut out for you, but if you're writing for ordinary people with no axes to grind, just consider the results… and try to remember the difference between ambiguous and ungrammatical.