Semantics of Attendant Circumstance : A Cognitive Study on Circumstantial Constructions and its relation to Subjectivity

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Dangling participles are considered incorrect usage in written Standard English. Nonetheless, dangling participles enjoy widespread usage, particularly in spoken English. This study argues that the use of dangling participles is semantically and cognitively motivated. In adopting a usage-based view and analyzing attested data from the British National Corpus, this study shows that constructions with a dangling participle describe a coherent "cognizance scenario" as their constructional meaning. The dangling participial construction evokes a conceptualizer who conceives the situation described in the main clause. Thanks to its constructional semantics, the dangling participle is especially common in text genres which focus on the interaction with the hearer.The dangling participial construction is closely related to the Ground, i.e. to the speaker and the hearer and the time of speech. Its constructional meaning is therefore highly subjective or, in including the hearer, intersubjective. In spite of the notorious "inconsistency of the controller subject", the construction as a whole is fully motivated as an instance of subjective construal.Another theoretical implication of the present study is the importance of a subjective construal at speech time. The dangling participial construction is ideally suited to express the speaker's subjective view of a state of affairs in an ongoing discourse. We do not seem to talk much about events or actions objectively, but rather about "how things are from our perspective." This communicative factor has motivated the "notorious" dangling participles and their entrenched use in conversation in spite of efforts of generations of prescriptive grammarians and teacher to dispel its use.