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In grammar, a dangling modifier is a misplaced modifier — a word or phrase that is intended to modify one element of a sentence but, owing to its placement in the sentence, seems to modify another element or none at all.

Dangling modifiers often appear at the beginning of a sentence, and are commonly found in adverbial phrases; rather than modifying the grammatical subject of the sentence, they seem to modify an unintended noun or pronoun due to the position of the modifier within the sentence. Strunk and White's Elements of Style provides an example:

Presumably, the speaker means that that he/she was peeking through the window, but because of the placement of "peeking through the window", it sounds as though the trailer was peeking through the window.

Perhaps the most (in)famous of the danglers is the participle, as illustrated by Strunk and White's example above. But other modifiers' dangling can be just as much trouble. Consider, for instance, "As president of the kennel club, my poodle must be well groomed."

Modifiers sometimes are intended to describe the attitude or mood of the speaker, even when the speaker isn't part of the sentence. Some such modifiers are fairly standard and are not considered dangling modifiers—"speaking of [topic]", for example, is commonly used as a transition from one topic to a related one. However, in a sentence such as "fuming, she left the room", "fuming" can only mean one thing: it must modify "she."

In the last forty years or so, controversy has arisen over the proper usage of the adverb hopefully.^[1] Some grammarians objected when they first encountered constructions as "Hopefully, the sun will be shining tomorrow." Their complaint stems from the fact that the term "hopefully" dangles, and can be understood to describe either the speaker's state of mind, or the manner in which the sun will shine. It was no longer just an adverb modifying a verb, an adjective or another adverb as hitherto, but conveniently also one that modified the whole sentence, in order to convey the attitude of the speaker.

In common speech, "hopefully", when used in this modern fashion, is known as a sentence adverb (cf. "admittedly", "mercifully", "oddly"). For example, most listeners will interpret "Hopefully, John got home last night" as meaning that the speaker hopes that John arrived home last night, not that John got home last night in a hopeful manner.

One of the reasons that the sentence adverb usage seems more acceptable these days is that its semantics are reminiscent of the German hoffentlich ("it is to be hoped that") which implies (in the context of the first example) that the speaker hopes the sun will shine. Furthermore, it is because of their conciseness, avoiding the need to put into several words what can be said in one, that the use of sentence adverbs is establishing itself more and more in colloquial speech. Per Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins^[2]:

No other word in English expresses that thought. In a single word we can say it is regrettable that (regrettably) or it is fortunate that (fortunately) or it is lucky that (luckily), and it would be comforting if there were such a word as hopably or, as suggested by Follett, hopingly, but there isn't. [...] In this instance nothing is to be lost—the word would not be destroyed in its primary meaning—and a useful, nay necessary term is to be gained.

What had been expressed in lengthy adverbial constructions, such as "it is regrettable that …" or "it is fortunate that …", had of course always been shortened to the adverbs "regrettably" or "fortunately". Bill Bryson says, "... those writers who scrupulously avoid 'hopefully' in such constructions do not hesitate to use at least a dozen other words—'apparently', 'presumably', 'happily', 'sadly', 'mercifully', 'thankfully', and so on—in precisely the same way".^[3] What has changed, however, in the controversy over "hopefully" being used for "he was hoping that ...", or "she was full of hope that ...", is that the original clause was transferred from the speaker, as a kind of shorthand to the subject itself, as though "it" had expressed the hope. ("Hopefully, the sun will be shining".) Although this still expressed the speaker's hope "that the sun will be shining" it may have caused a certain disorientation as to who was expressing what when it first appeared. As time passes, this controversy will fade as the usage becomes more and more accepted, especially since such adverbs as "mercifully", "gratefully", and "thankfully" are similarly used.

Merriam-Webster gives a usage note on its entry for "hopefully" in which the editors point out that the disjunct sense of the word dates to the early 18th century and had been in fairly widespread use since at least the 1930s. Objection to this sense of the word, they state, only became widespread in the 1960s. The editors note that this usage is "entirely standard".^[4]

Misplaced modifiers have sometimes been used for humorous effect. A famous example of this is by Groucho Marx as Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding in the 1930 film, Animal Crackers:

Though, logically, Captain Spaulding would have been wearing the pajamas, the line plays on the grammatical possibility that the elephant was wearing his pajamas, owing to its misplaced modifier.

• Garden path sentence, a stylistic pitfall that causes confusion in a way similar to dangling modifiers.
• Adverbial, for sentence adverbials commenting on a whole sentence.

1. ^ Kahn, John Ellison and Robert Ilson, Eds. The Right Word at the Right Time: A Guide to the English Language and How to Use It, pp. 27–29. London: The Reader's Digest Association Limited, 1985. ISBN 0-276-38439-3.
2. ^ Bernstein, Theodore M. Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, p. 51. The Noonday Press, New York, 1971. ISBN 0-374-52315-0.
3. ^ Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Bill Bryson, pp. 242, Broadway Books, New York, 2002, ISBN 0-7679-1043-5
4. ^ "hopefully." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2007. http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=hopefully (15 Aug. 2007).

• Dangling modifiers
• Hopefully as sentence adverb
• Hopefully fails to modify sentence elements. Originally citing Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words