linglinrtw wrote:
(A) scholars’ categorizing Tacitus’s Germania as
(B) scholars’ categorizing Tacitus’s Germania as if (as if is a bit awkward and changes the meaning slightly)
(C) scholars, categorizing of Tacitus’s Germania as (modifying scholars)
(D) scholars who categorize Tacitus’s Germania as (changes the meaning, amused by the categorization, not the scholars)
(E) scholars who categorize Tacitus’s Germania if (changes the meaning, amused by the categorization, not the scholars)
Good analysis of D and E. However, "categorizing" is not modifying "scholars" in C - instead, "categorizing" is modifying the entire preceding clause "Modern critics are amused by early scholars".
-ing can be one of three things:
1. verb
2. noun
3. present participle modifier
To be a verb, -ing must have a "to be" in front of it (ex. I
am typing). That doesn't happen here.
To be a noun, -ing has to be a subject or an object of something (i.e. it has to function as a noun). That also doesn't happen here.
So, "categorizing" is a present participle modifier.
Without a preceding comma, a present participle modifier gives us restrictive (necessary to identify) information about the preceding noun or noun phrase. For example:
"The girl
playing the piano is excellent." Here "playing the piano" is giving us information about the girl - information that we need to know in order to identify which girl is excellent.
However, with a preceding comma, a present participle modifier gives us additional information about the entire preceding clause. For exmaple:
"The girl played the piano,
striking each key with precision." Here "striking each key with precision" is modifying the entire preceding clause "the girl played the piano" - it is telling us that, while playing the piano, she is striking each key with precision. Notice, and this is the point of all of this, that we are not saying that the immediately preceding noun ("piano") is striking each key, rather we are saying that the subject of the preceding clause ("girl") is striking each key.
By the way, sometimes we see this:
"The girl played the piano, masterfully
striking each key with precision." This is the same as before - the addition of "masterfully" doesn't change it because it is just modifying the modifier (telling us how she is striking each key with precision).
Back to the original sentence, C says:
"Modern critics are amused by early scholars,
categorizing of Tacitus’s Germania as an ethnographic treatise."
"Categorizing" is modifying the immediately preceding clause "Modern critics are amused by early scholars", meaning that, in their being amused by the scholars, modern critics also categorize Tacitus’s Germania as an ethnographic treatise. Notice here that the present participle modifier preceded by a comma is modifying the subject of the immediately preceding clause ("modern critics"), not the immediately preceding noun ("scholars"). That's a big difference.
This still has a distorted meaning because we actually want the scholars to be the ones doing the categorizing. D and E correctly have the scholars doing the categorizing, but they are wrong because they have the critics being amused by the scholars (and which scholars? the ones who tend to categorize...) when instead we want the critics to be amused by the characterization itself.
I only make this point because present participle modifiers that are set off by commas are somewhat commonly tested on the GMAT, so we need to be really careful about what they modify.