Dangling Participles
A present participle is a verb ending in -ing.
This sentence is made up of two clauses:
The main clause: I fell over and bruised myself.
The subordinate clause: Running down the street.
In this case, the sentence makes sense and can be understood easily. However, in the following example the subject of the main clause - me - does not come at the beginning of the clause but at the end:
If looked at logically, it would seem that the car was doing the running rather than me because the participle usually applies to first item in the main clause which is usually the subject.
When a participle is so far away from the subject of the main clause we call it a Dangling Participle.
Grammatically they are not wrong, however stylistically they can cause confusion and should be avoided.
Ambiguous Examples
Who has the money in his hands?
Who is peering through the window?
ELT Culture
Sometimes in the culture of English Langauge Teaching ironic reference is made to dangling participles or dangling modifiers to talk about pedantic and unnecessary concentration on grammar and the details of English at the expense of teaching or learning useful and functional English.
The issue of whether a participle is dangling or not isn't really that important on the scale of ELT in relation to, for example, verb tenses or SVO sentence structure.
