It thus "dangles", as in these sentences: Ambiguous: Walking down Main Street (clause), the trees were beautiful (object).
In both cases, whether the intended meaning is obscured or not may depend on context - if the previous sentences clearly established a subject, then it may be obvious who was walking down Main Street or reaching the station.
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style states that "A participle phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject".
[5] However, this prohibition has been questioned; more descriptivist authors consider that a dangling participle is only problematic when there is actual ambiguity.
[6] Many respected and successful writers have used dangling participles without confusion; one example is Virginia Woolf whose work includes many such phrases, such as "Lying awake, the floor creaked" (in Mrs Dalloway) or "Sitting up late at night it seems strange not to have more control" (in The Waves).
Non-participial modifiers that dangle can also be troublesome: After years of being lost under a pile of dust, Walter P. Stanley, III, left, found all the old records of the Bangor Lions Club.
In the film Mary Poppins, Mr. Dawes Sr. dies of laughter after hearing the following joke: "I know a man with a wooden leg called Smith".
Another famous example of this humorous effect is by Groucho Marx as Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding in the 1930 film Animal Crackers: One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
[9]Though under the most plausible interpretation of the first sentence, Captain Spaulding would have been wearing the pajamas, the line plays on the grammatical possibility that the elephant was instead.
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".
[13] Merriam-Webster gives a usage note on its entry for "hopefully"; the editors point out that the disjunct sense of the word dates to the early 18th century and has been in widespread use since at least the 1930s.
[14] As in a theatre, the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious.