Finding the Center First

So much depends on method. When we want to do something—and what we do with our mind is just as real as what we do with our hands—the way we begin can make all the difference, because where we launch out from will determine how we fare to our goal of understanding or making something. In writing, and more specifically in analyzing composition, there is a way to proceed which antidotes the natural tendency we have to look frantically around a sentence for some place to start. That haphazard manner almost never avails. So how do we enter upon the sure way to a grammatical answer?

Let’s say we’ve written a sentence like the following, and in reading it again we’re now wondering whether we should have one comma, two commas, or no commas at all: The cat, sitting sleepily on the stairs, leapt suddenly at the cicada. Like that cat, we have it in our human nature too to jump at something, and in trying to understand the construction and punctuation of a sentence, that can mean beginning with any word that seems to resemble a verb—because every sentence has a verb, right? Every formally complete sentence does have a verb (most often explicitly present, but sometimes merely implicitly so), but not every word that resembles a verb is a verb, much less the main verb of the sentence.

So because words can appear as something they’re not, it’s best in analyzing a sentence to begin at the beginning and end at the end, always finding first the skeletal center of the clause—the subject and its real verb. By real verb I mean what the grammarians call the finite verb, a word of action or identity which is specifically connected to a subject by real, or chronological, tense (among other verbal properties). In the sentence we’re looking at, the cat did something at a specific moment in time: it leapt, and so in combining those two words, we produce the frame, or skeleton, of the clause. Those two parts, subject and finite verb, constitute the center of grammatical gravity of the assertion.

But didn’t the cat also sit? And isn’t sit, therefore, also a verb? It’s true that the cat was sitting somewhere, but notice that the sentence does not include the verb was. We have only the participle sitting, and a participle is not a finite verb. A participle is built from a verb and it has time, but the time it represents is relative, not absolute or real or time according to the clock. Sitting is a present participle, and present in a relative context means contemporaneous to the real time of the finite verb. Thus, the cat that leapt at a certain moment in the past was doing something else at that past time, namely, sitting sleepily on the stairs; but since the participle sitting is not a finite verb, we cannot say that the sentence explicitly asserts that the cat was sitting—it only implies that by way of description.

Without having first determined the grammatical center of the sentence, we could have very likely been misled by the verbal impression of the participle, thinking that sitting was the verb of the clause. Since, though, we began our analysis correctly, that central point we discovered gave us an orientation which helped us see the subordinate position of sitting; we were not distracted, that is, by the verbal sense of that participle. And that same grammatical gravity can also help us with our original question about the commas. We must have two commas if any at all, because one marks the beginning and the other the end of the participial phrase sitting sleepily on the stairs. But does that phrase need to be set off by commas at all?

No, if it defines the cat that leapt (perhaps there were others in the vicinity); yes, if it merely describes more fully the only cat that leapt (there apparently being no other cats and so no need to define which particular cat leapt). That’s a lot to think about, and without proceeding first to the center of the sentence, so to speak—to the vantage point of subject and finite verb—we risk losing our grammatical balance, making good and basic questions more difficult than they really are if not taken up methodically.

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