punctuation - What is a comma splice?


Is this a comma splice? What makes a sentence a comma splice?



Being left at the altar on her wedding day, Pamela became furious.




Answer



There was just a post today on Language Log about constructions like this, known as absolutives. In it, Mark Liberman quotes from the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language:


pages 1265-6 of CGEL, where the followed two examples are given:



His hands gripping the door, he let out a volley of curses.
This done, she walked off without another word.


... The [italicized] non-finites are supplements with the main clause as anchor. [The examples shown] contain a subject, and belong to what is known as the absolute construction, one which is subordinate in form but with no syntactic link to the main clause. […]


In [none of these examples] is there any explicit indication of the semantic relation between the supplement and the anchor. This has to be inferred from the content of the clauses and/or the context.



A comma splice, on the other hand, is when two sentences are connected with a comma instead of a period.


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