Name that construction

[btz]

Dear folks,

How would you classify the italicized phrase in the following sentence?

"As a flurry of 30 aftershocks, some measuring greater than magnitude 6.0, continued to strike the region all day, Chile's Interior Ministry said tsunami surges reaching heights of 10 feet hit the nation's Juan Fernandez Islands, leaving three people dead and 13 missing."

Is it a nominative absolute?

[Skyanne]

I would say it is a dependent clause or even a relative clause.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/clauses.htm

[btz]

But doesn't a dependent clause need to lead off with a subordinating conjunction or a relative pronoun?

[fev]

I don't see a clause there. Innit just a participial phrase?

[LisaMc]

I'm with fev. The "some" throws us off, but it's still just a participial phrase. It is not a nominative absolute. A relative clause would be: "some of which measured greater than magnitude 6.0."

[btz]

Thanks for the link to that grammar & writing Web site, Skyanne.

"Usually (but not always, as we shall see), an absolute phrase (also called a nominative absolute) is a group of words consisting of a noun or pronoun and a participle as well as any related modifiers."

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/phrases.htm#absolute

[aparker54]

It's not a participial phrase, though it contains a participle. I suspect that it's just a modifying phrase.

[aparker54]

My first thought was "appositive," and that's what my husband thought first, too. But "appositive" seems to be used, in general, of full equivalents. If only I were back home with my reference books.

[aparker54]

After some discussion, my husband, who is a classicist, wrote the following: "Syntax, Shmyntax."

My father spoke of the phrase in question as an adjectival phrase. He's a translator of Aristophanes, and a classicist.

My father's girlfriend, a classicist but also a published mystery writer, said this: "Though it pains me to say it, this may be a prime example of what those mod-grammar people would call the folly of trying to apply Latin syntactical thinking to English."

She's far more hard-nosed than I am in traditional 20th- and 21st-century ideas of English usage. (Yes, I have a doctorate in classics, but it was an afterthought, or maybe a forethought.)

I think that this is a case for Geoffrey Pullum.