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I have just stumbled upon a sentence:

Dressed in a white dress, Stella looked breathtakingly beautiful.

I was wondering if the very first part of the sentence (Dressed in a white dress-nonfinite "-ed" clause) could be regarded as a form of a detached predicate. I do not know how else to classify it (or to determine its syntactic function)

In other cases (For example: Too tired to continue working, Stella went home), I can clearly see that the initial part is, in fact, a detached predictive.

Both of these seem like detached modifiers to me...

Let me know what you think! Thank you so much in advance!

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  • "Predicative" or "predictive"? And what do they mean? Where does the term come from? It is easy to believe that everybody uses the same grammatical terminology for English, but this is far from the truth.
    – jlawler
    Commented Jun 11, 2022 at 16:39
  • Yes, "dressed in a white dress" is predicated of "Stella". It's a past-participial clause functioning as a supplementary depictive adjunct. Predicative means relating to a predicand; here the adjunct is predicative in that it relates to a predicand, "Stella". In your other example "too tired to continue working" is a predicative adjunct. It's predicative because it relates to a predicand, "Stella", and it's an adjunct, in this case a supplement, a loosely attached to the main clause. Cf. the predicative complement in "Stella was too tired to continue working".
    – BillJ
    Commented Jun 14, 2022 at 7:39
  • Incidentally, "too tired to continue working" is not a non-finite clause but an adjective phrase headed by the adjective "tired".
    – BillJ
    Commented Jun 14, 2022 at 12:00

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