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Detached Participles in 
English Discourse

The focus of the present paper is the function ofpresent participial absolute clauses in English
discourse. These clauses are in fact the only -ing
constructions in English that are “detached”, i.e. they are set
off by pauses, exhibit a clause-final falling intonation
contour characteristic of independent clauses, or are
preceded by a clause ending with a clause-final falling
contour. These intonational signals of detachment are
virtually without exception marked by commas in writing.

Taking all these features into consideration and
following the tradition of Russian grammar, we shall refer
to the present participial absolute clauses as “detached
participles”. Excluded from consideration here are
participial forms in clauses beginning with the

subordinators after, before, by, with, without, while, and in.
Thus the detached participle can be characterized in the following way:
1. It serves as a device that allows the speaker/writer to present certain material as

background against which certain other material can be put forth as “figure” in the
Gestalt sense. That is, the detached participle is not just a background, but it is a
background specifically for the main clause with which it is associated. By
“background” we mean material that serves to further explicate, amplify, or elaborate
what is in the main clause, or that represents an event occurring simultaneously with or
providing a comment on or motivation for the event in the main clause.

In the example, the detached participle hacking at the logs with axes provides a detail
that functions to amplify and elaborate the report that the infantry hurled themselves
against the palisades. 

The Spanish infantry desperately hurled themselves against the
palisades, hacking at the logs with axes.

A clause so backgrounded refuses, as it were, to allow the exposition to advance
while some ancillary material is presented. The fact that the detached participle provides
background of a very local sort, predicts a certain set of grammatical properties.

2. This background material is furthermore presented as “pure” background, with no
explicit relationship being designated to hold between it and the material that forms the
figure. The fact that the detached participle does not explicitly express any logical or
temporal relationship with the material for which it is the background, predicts the
detached participle’s distribution in discourse.

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Linguistics Armenian Folia Anglistika

Astghik Chubaryan



The first point to make about the occurrence of the detached participle in discourse
is that, as is intuitively obvious to anyone who knows English, and as is noted by
Jespersen, it is found much more commonly in formal written than in informal spoken
English.

The analysis has shown that the detached participle is most compatible with a
discourse whose purpose is to describe events rather than to state temporal or logical
relationships among them. Actually, we found that the descriptive discourse has a high
frequency of detached participles, whereas the discourse whose primary function is non-
descriptive exposition contains relatively few instances.

In fact, the type of discourse in which detached participles abound can be
characterized with even greater precision: it is a discourse that attempts to describe by
creating an image. To this function the detached participle is well suited, precisely
because of its unspecified relationship with the main clause. The type of discourse whose
purport is to evoke an image can be termed depictive.

To illustrate the contrast between depictive and non-depictive discourse, we
compared texts taken from various types of discourse for an average number of detached
participles per 10,000 words. As can be seen from the table below, the differences are
dramatic.

Detached participles per 10,000 words
Depictive
Severin T. Explorers of the Mississippi 74
DeLillo D. Underworld, novel 60
Salter J. Burning the Days, memoir, travel narrative 49
Non-depictive
Kazin A. God and the American Writer, literary criticism 18.9
Tannahill R. Food in History 14.7
David J. Electrodynamics 8.5
Goth A. Medical Pharmacology: Principles and Concepts 5.0

One of the richest of the texts examined was Severin’s Explorers of the Mississippi.
This text is a detailed historical account of the early explorations of the Mississippi
River. Here is a typical paragraph, which gives the flavour of the depictive style – note
that there are three detached participles in this paragraph alone:

De Soto’s life was saved but his negligence was still to prove the
ruin of his expedition. During the skirmish in the town, the Indians
in the baggage train had seized their opportunity to escape. They
broke ranks and streamed into Mobila, taking with them all the
Spanish supplies including the spare weapons, sacraments, tents,
pearls, and gunpowder. By the time the main body of the Spanish
army arrived, the situation was desperate. They had only their
weapons, while on the other side of Mobila’s palisades lay all the

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Armenian Folia Anglistika                                                                                  Linguistics 



equipment they needed to survive the march down the coast.
Already the ramparts were lined with newly-liberated slaves,
jeering and holding up their booty to mock the white men.

In Explorers of the Mississippi there is an average of 74 detached participles per
10,000 words. At the opposite end of the scale is Medical Pharmacology, in which
10,000 words yield only 5 detached participles. The striking difference between these
two texts in frequency of detached participles is an accurate illustration of the tendency
for these clauses to occur in depictive genres. Some other examples of depictive writing
are travel narratives and novels, where the authors attempt to portray the images, sights
and sounds so vividly as to conjure up in the reader’s imagination what actually
experiencing them would be like.

Writing that intends to spark the visual imagination, then, tends to abound in
detached participles. Herein lies one clue to explaining the very low frequency of
detached participles in ordinary conversational English: conversation simply offers
relatively few opportunities for the sort of planning that produces effective and evocative
depictions of scenes. What are the characteristics of non-depictive writing, where
detached participles are rare? The only essential property shared by the wide range of
discourse styles that can be called non-depictive is obviously the following: their
communicative goals are not conducive to the leisurely scene-painting for which the
highly durative, temporally non-committal detached participle is so well suited.

News analysis and commentary, for example, are typically devoid of detached
participles. The backgrounding in this type of writing is generally aimed at
characterizing participants rather than describing them (hence a large number of full and
truncated relative clauses), and at providing motivation, concessive or sequentially
relevant facts and hypothetical conditions, rather than depictions of scenes.

Writing in the sciences and social sciences does not appear to be fertile ground for
detached participles either. Here are two examples taken from David’s Electrodynamics
and Goth’s pharmacology textbook to give the flavour of their function in this kind of
writing:

Our intention will be correct provided the set of orthonormal
functions is complete, the completeness being defined by the
requirement that there exists a finite number. (p.68)

The binding of bilirubin to albumin may be inhibited by a
variety of drugs such as sulfisoxazole or salicycates, the freed
bilirubin thereby becoming ultrafiltrable. (p.20)

Tannahill’s Food in History registers slightly higher at 14.7 detached participles per
10,000 words; this higher incidence is correlated with the fact that there are occasional
depictive passages interspersed in the purely informative historical exposition.

Alfred Kazin’s God and the American Writer is a sample of literary criticism, which

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Linguistics Armenian Folia Anglistika



as essentially non-depictive writing is low in detached participles, but not as low as
scientific writing, since some images are evoked.

Although the comparison between the depictive and non-depictive texts clearly
reveals the skewing in the distribution of detached participles, it is only when we
examine the detached participles themselves that we find the key to the explanation for
this distribution. The detached participles that do occur in non-depictive writing share
one interesting property: they tend to be stylistic alternatives to other coordinate and
subordinate clauses in a way in which the detached participles in depictive writing are
not. As an illustration, consider an example taken from the pharmacology textbook:

Even the pharmacist has very little to do with the preparation
of drugs, most of them being manufactured by large companies.
(p.l)

The detached participle in this example could very easily be replaced by a
subordinate clause with as, with virtually no violation of the intended message:

... as most of them are manufactured by large companies.

Similarly in the following example from Food in History, the detached participle is
extremely close in expressive content to the non-restrictive relative clause:

Of these seven magical oceans, representing the staple needs
of mankind in India (other than grain), no less than three were of
dairy products.

…, which represent the staple needs of mankind in India ...

Strikingly enough, however, this type of paraphrasability is much less characteristic
of the detached participles in highly depictive passages. No obvious paraphrase comes
to mind for these three examples, for instance:

She listened, marveling at the discernment in each name for
the complex illness of malaria... (Underworld, p. 87)

The Indians stayed out of their way, leaving mute offerings of
food, deerskins, and feathered cloaks in the path of the ferocious
invaders. (Explorers of the Mississippi,  p.36)

Shopkeepers, dressed in white shirts and sarong-like skirts,
with embroidered skull  caps over their sharp Arabian faces, sat on
string beds, outside their cavernous shops, talking slowly and
smoking tall water-pipes. (Burning the Days, p. 26)

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Armenian Folia Anglistika                                                                                  Linguistics 



The unavailability of apt paraphrases for the detached participle in the depictive texts
is related, of course, to their high frequency: there are no other options at hand for
conveying what they convey, and their functional load is thereby increased. But why are
they difficult to paraphrase? The answer might lie precisely in the non-committal
relationship they bear to the main clause, which makes them so well suited to scene
depiction. 

The point of depictive writing is to create scenes, and background material in depictive
discourse contributes to scene creation in an additive way, temporal and logical relationships
being essentially irrelevant. The point of non-depictive writing, on the other hand, is to
analyse situations, propose and support claims, and enhance understanding by relating
pieces of information. Background clauses are called upon to participate in this endeavour
and must, to a much greater extent, bear explicitly labelled relationships with the main
clause. As suggested earlier in non-depictive writing there is simply less opportunity for the
luxury of detached participles, whose relationship with the main clause is so unspecified.
Those that do occur are paraphrasable as certain other types of clauses because the non-
depictive context imposes interpretations on them of precisely the logical and temporal
relationships explicitly expressed by those other types of clauses.

Thus, the examination of the distribution of detached participles among various types of
written English has revealed a striking contrast between depictive and non-depictive writing
in the frequency with which these clauses occur. It has been claimed that the explanation for
this contrast lies in the suitability of the detached participle – given its indeterminate
relationship with the main clause – for discourse whose purpose is to evoke images, and its
concomitant unsuitability for discourse whose background information must be much more
explicitly related to the figure material. To sum up, the present analysis once again
demonstrates the heavy reliance of grammar on the goals of the communicative event. That
is, understanding grammar is inseparable from understanding the principles by which
language users decide how to package an entire discourse.

References:

1. Chafe W. How do people use adverbial clauses. In: Brugman C., Macaulay M.
Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society.
Berkeley, Berkeley Linguistic Society, 1984, p.437-449.

2. Greenbaum S. Adverbial –ing Participle Constructions in English. Anglia, 1973,
p. 91: 1-10.

3. Jespersen O. A Modern English Grammar. Part V, Syntax, vol.4, Copenhagen,
Munksgaard, 1940.

4. Kortmann B. Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of Control and
Interpretation.  London and New York, Routledge, 1991.

5. Thompson S. ‘Subordination’ in Formal and Informal Discourse. In: Schiffrin D.
Meaning, Form and Use in Context. Washington DC, Georgetown University
Press, 1984.

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Linguistics Armenian Folia Anglistika



Sources of Data:

6.  David J. Electrodynamics. New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1999.
7.  DeLillo D. Underworld. New York, Scribner, 1997.
8.  Goth A. Medical Pharmacology: Principles and Concepts. St. Louis, C.V. Mosby

Co, 1974.                                 
9.  Severin T. Explorers of the Mississippi. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1967.
10. Kazin A. God and the American Writer. New York, Random House, 1997.
11. Salter J. Burning the Days. New York, Random House, 1997.
12. Tannahill R. Food in History. New York, Stein and Day, 1974.

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Armenian Folia Anglistika                                                                                  Linguistics