Grammar Help, Please.

[abracanabra]

I can't find the correct terminology for this sentence construction, and it has been driving me mad! What is it called when you use a comma to join an independent and a dependent clause without a conjunction--correct only if they describe actions that switch tense from past to present.

For example, "She ran for the door, grabbing her purse as she went."

Would the second clause be a coordinate verb phrase?

I know this is rather technical, but it's bugging me a lot to not be able to use the correct terminology when noting incorrect use.

Comments

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Wow, I am rarely stumped on noodly grammar bits (although my usual style is full of garbage and errors, b/c lazy), but you got me. Is the example you give correct or incorrect usage?

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that it's correct. The incorrect would be, "She ran for the door, grabbed her purse as she went." (comma splice)

The sentence looks correct, yes?

Most of my grammar understanding is self-taught, which means I'm missing correct terms for a lot of it.

[ninicat.livejournal.com]

Most of my grammar understanding is self-taught, which means I'm missing correct terms for a lot of it.

As is mine. When you're learning grammar from reading, they very rarely include the terms for the sentence structure they use. But, your example sentence looks correct to me as well.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yours definitely looks correct, and the "grabbed" example is definitely a comma splice. But I don't think it's the tense change that makes it correct, I think it's the -ing verb which is maybe a gerund and maybe another thingy. If you said "I run for the door, grabbing my purse as I go" that would also be correct, I think.

~~~~

Ok, I dug a little, and the part after the comma is apparently a participle phrase--"grabbing" is a participle in this case (there's a wikipedia article about gerunds vs. participles that's not extremely illuminating), and it's not a dependent/subordinate clause because it has no object. Here's a good page about it: http://www.siskiyous.edu/class/engl52/reynoldss/n_participles.htm

"coordinate verb phrase" may be a linguistics superset that includes participle phrases as well as other things--google doesn't find that term in any grammar handy-notes stuff as far as I can tell, but does find it in a couple of language description docs, including this pretty interesting PDF about the Telugu language of India.

I had some formal grammar instruction, but it was 1000 years ago, so it's mostly slipped into the abyss of memory.

[mischief03.livejournal.com]

I'll second the coordinate verb phrase. That would be what I would call it in a linguistics text, though possibly not in a grammar text.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Ha! I went in looking for a grammar term, and came out with a grammar term and a linguistics term!

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Aha! I haz slain the fearsome participle!

Or, at least, identified it.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Hi! half_double sent me.

To my knowledge, what you have there is a complex sentence. It's made up of an independent clause and a dependent clause, and "grabbing" is a participle. So your dependent (or subordinate) clause is a participial phrase.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Participle! That's the word I was looking for!

Thank you so much. You are fabulous. So is half_double for sending you.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad to have been able to help.

The problem with participles is that they are sometimes easily confused with gerunds. The standard way to tell them apart is that a gerund acts as a noun (Skiing is fun) whereas a participle acts as a verb (Skiing down the hill, Bob remembered he hadn't turned off the oven).

[prof-vencire.livejournal.com]

Grammar is essentially a lie almost half of the time.

I am only saying.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Grammar is a lie we tell ourselves to explain why some bits work and some bits don't.

This makes it one of the important lies.

[prof-vencire.livejournal.com]

Well, there's Little Grammar and there's Big Grammar. Little Grammar is arbitrary, you can mash it up, leave it out, and no one gets confused. Big Grammar, on the other hand, needs to be there or nobody gets a damn thing. At a minimum, though, what matters is not the specific rules but the internal consistency and sense-making.

Language as a concrete thing always bugs me a bit, is all.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Shifting the level as you go through is also a fun thing, when done with malice aforethought.