Висящие модификаторы: типы и примеры грамматических ошибок.

Type of misplaced grammatical phrase
A dangling modifier (also known as a hanging, unattached, illogical or dangling participle) is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle. A writer may use a dangling modifier intending to modify a subject while word order may imply that the modifier describes an object, or vice versa. An example of a dangling modifier appears in the sentence "Turning the corner, a handsome school building appeared". The modifying clause Turning the corner describes the behavior of the narrator, but the narrator is only implicit in the sentence. The sentence could be misread as the turning action attaching either to the handsome school building or to nothing at all. As another example, in the sentence "At the age of eight, my family finally bought a dog", the modifier At the age of eight is dangling. It is intended to specify the narrator's age when the family bought the dog, but the narrator is again only implicitly a part of the sentence. It could be read as the family was eight years old when it bought the dog.

Dangling participles are similar to clauses in absolute constructions, but absolute constructions are considered uncontroversial and grammatical. The difference is that a participle phrase in an absolute construction is not semantically attached to any single element in the sentence. A participle phrase is intended to modify a particular noun or pronoun, but in a dangling participle, it is instead erroneously attached to a different noun or to nothing; whereas in an absolute clause, is not intended to modify any noun at all, and thus modifying nothing is the intended use. An example of an absolute construction is:
The weather being beautiful, we plan to go to the beach today.

Participial modifiers can sometimes be intended to describe the attitude or mood of the speaker, even when the speaker is not part of the sentence. Some such modifiers are standard and are not considered dangling modifiers: "Speaking of [topic]", and "Trusting that this will put things into perspective", for example, are commonly used to transition from one topic to a related one or for adding a conclusion to a speech. An example of a contested use would be "Frankly, he is lying to you"; such usage is not uncommon by writers, but strictly speaking that sentence would be in violation of older style guide prohibitions as it is the speaker being frank, not "he" in such a sentence.

Since about the 1960s, controversy has arisen over the proper usage of the adverb hopefully. Some grammarians object to constructions such as "Hopefully, the sun will be shining tomorrow". Their complaint is that the term "hopefully" is understood as the manner in which the sun will shine if read literally, with the suggested modification "I hope the sun will shine tomorrow" if it is the speaker that is full of hope. "Hopefully" used in this way is a disjunct (cf. "admittedly", "mercifully", "oddly"). Disjuncts (also called sentence adverbs) are useful in colloquial speech for the concision they permit. No other word in English expresses that thought. In a single word we can say it is regrettable that (regrettably) or it is fortunate that (fortunately) or it is lucky that (luckily), and it would be comforting if there were such a word as hopably or, as suggested by Follett, hopingly, but there isn't. [ ] In this instance nothing is to be lost – the word would not be destroyed in its primary meaning – and a useful, nay necessary term is to be gained. What had been expressed in lengthy adverbial constructions, such as "it is regrettable that ". or "it is fortunate that "., had of course always been shortened to the adverbs "regrettably" or "fortunately". Bill Bryson says, "those writers who scrupulously avoid 'hopefully' in such constructions do not hesitate to use at least a dozen other words – 'apparently', 'presumably', 'happily', 'sadly', 'mercifully', 'thankfully', and so on – in precisely the same way". Merriam Webster gives a usage note on its entry for "hopefully"; the editors point out that the disjunct sense of the word dates to the early 18th century and has been in widespread use since at least the 1930s. Objection to this sense of the word, they state, became widespread only in the 1960s. The Merriam Webster editors maintain that this usage is "entirely standard".