which sentence modifiers are correctly placed?

Question

Driving to the grocery store, she saw an accident on the highway.

 

She saw an accident on the highway driving to the grocery store.

 

Driving to the grocery store, an accident on the highway was seen by her.

Answer 1

I'm assuming that the only "sentence modifier" that's really in question here is the participial phrase driving to the grocery store since this occurs in all three of your examples and in two different positions, and the only difference between the two sentences where it occurs in the same position, i.e., initially, is that the main clause of one of the sentences is in the active voice, that is, she saw an accident on the highway and the other is in the passive, an accident on the highway was seen by her (and the choice of the passive here makes the sentence rather awkward).

 

On this assumption then, only the way that driving to the grocery store is used in the first sentence would be considered unambiguously "correct" since the understood subject of the verb driving in the participial phrase, namely she, is identical in reference to the subject of the main clause she saw an accident on the highway and this then would be an example of the "correct" modification of the main clause subject. In your third sentence, however, the subject of the main clause is an accident and therefore if, logically, we still consider that she is the understood subject of driving to the grocery store there is a mismatch of reference; that is, first of all, accidents, being inanimate abstract nouns, don't drive, an activity reserved for humans and Google Self-Driving Cars (though I have heard of incidents where animals and pets have--accidentally [pardon the ironic usage]--taken control of vehicles). Another, schoolmarmish, way of saying this is that Driving to the grocery store, an accident on the highway was seen by her "must" mean that it was the accident that was driving to the grocery store, an obvious impossibility. This is actually an example of a classic grammatical "error" called a dangling participle.

 

The correctness of the modifier placement in your second sentence, She saw an accident on the highway driving to the grocery store, is a bit more problematic to assess. There is a general preference in both prescriptive and empirical grammar (i.e., subjectively how the language "should" be versus an objective account of actual usage) for modifiers to be placed as close as possible to the sentence elements they modify. Thus, in a very literal reading of She saw an accident on the highway driving to the grocery store, one might argue that the participial phrase driving to the grocery store again "must" modify the highway, i.e., the noun phrase that occurs immediately before it in the sentence. Once more, under this interpretation we'd have a clear semantic incongruity in that it's impossible for highways, like accidents, to drive.

 

But a much more reasonable account of this sentence would be to say that driving to the grocery store here is actually a reduced form of the subordinate clause while she was driving to the grocery store, i.e., where the subject she of this clause is identical to the main clause subject, and thus any ambiguity is dissipated. Nevertheless, because some people would object to the sentence as you gave it for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, the "correctness" of the modifier placement in She saw an accident on the highway driving to the grocery store has to remain suspect at best.