Identify the syntactic error in the sentence: 'Perched high atop the cliffs of Santorini, the tourists photographed the whitewashed village.'
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. misplaced modifier
- Step 1: The participial phrase 'Perched high atop the cliffs of Santorini' precedes 'the tourists', illogically describing the tourists as perched permanently atop the cliffs. Because the whitewashed village is the entity perched on the cliff, the modifier is misplaced relative to its intended noun. Answer: misplaced modifier. Why not the others: "subject-verb disagreement" occurs when the subject noun and finite verb fail to match in number; "faulty parallel structures" violates grammatical symmetry across items in a coordinated series; "comma splice connection" joins two independent clauses with only a comma and no conjunction.
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