Participial Phrases

Exercise 1: Identify the subject and the verb in the sentence below:

Pursued by the French army of a hundred thousand men under the command of Bonaparte,

encountering a population that was unfriendly to it, losing confidence in its allies, suffering

from shortness of supplies, and compelled to act under conditions of war unlike anything

that had been foreseen, the Russian army of thirty-five thousand men commanded by

Kutúzov was hurriedly retreating along the Danube, stopping where overtaken by the enemy

and fighting rearguard actions only as far as necessary to enable it to retreat without losing

its heavy equipment.

- from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Exercise 2 - Unscrambling exercises:

Order the phrases below to create a comprehensible sentence with a participial phrase. Disregard the names in italics; those are the writers and novels from which the sentences are taken.

Ex: was waiting on the landing outside / Bernard / wearing a black turtleneck sweater, dirty flannels and slippers \

Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

1. lost his grip / dropping endlessly straight down to the far end of the trailer / and fell free / Malcolm

Michael Crichton, The Lost World

2. screaming and begging to be allowed to go with her mother / when we had made our way downstairs / saw the woman with the lovely complexion / Miss Pilzer / we

Gerda Weissmann Klein, All But My Life

3. coming down the pole / with no control over my movements / had a sense / I / of being whirled violently through the air

Richard E. Byrd, Alone

4. and yet knowing no way to avoid it / that winter my mother and brother came / buying furniture on the installment plan / and we set up housekeeping / being cheated

Richard Wright, Black Boy

5. black / a little house / perched on high piles / in the distance / appeared

Joseph Conrad, “The Lagoon”