Re: dangling participles

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>> 'He sat on a rock watching an eagle soar above him'.
>
>Regarding this sentence, I agree with Dennis that since "him" is
>used as opposed to "it" and since a rock doesn't have the ability to see,
>this sentence is not so problematic. However, in some languages there is
>no differentiation between "him/her" and "it". For example, L1 Hebrew
>speakers will say "I saw him/her" when referring to a person or a thing
>since Hebrew uses the same word ("oto" for masculine nouns and "ota" for
>feminine nouns) for both people and things. So, "I saw him" and "I saw it
>(masculine noun)" would be "raiti oto".
>

With languages which have one pronoun for he/she/it, you have a more
serious problem.  In this sentence John is sitting on the rock, so if the
eagle is soaring above him, it is also soaring above the rock.  However, if
we change the sentence to

John sat near the lighthouse, watching an eagle soaring above him/her/it

we get into a real ambiguity - is the eagle soaring above John or the
lighthouse?  My guess is that most people would assume the lighthouse - you
can either look at this in terms of binding, or a metaphorical rule that
CLOSENESS IN A SENTENCE IS CLOSENESS IN SPACE.

[Anyone doing the Typology module may find this intersting]
Languages which have one pronoun for people and objects may have a
different pronoun for locations.  In Turkish you could translate the above
sentence as:

John, fenerin yakInda oturup, onun yukarda ki uCan kartalI seyretti
John, lighthouse+GEN. near+LOC. sit+PRECEDING-ACTION, it+GEN. above+LOC.
that fly+REL.SUBJ. eagle+ACC. view+PAST.

which is ambiguous (but probably John, not the lighthouse), or you can
substitute "oranIn" (that-place+GEN.) for "onun", which disambiguates it.

Incidentally, Lojban (a constructed language based on predicate logic) has
*ten* possible pronouns.  They're all grammatically the same, and can stand
for anything - you just assign them as you want.

Best wishes,

                Robin

 P.S. Anyone interested in Lojban can check it out at
<http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/>