When reading the newspaper, I came across this sentence:
Then, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) put out a detailed blog post last week explaining how they believed Hermit was being used to target devices.
I am confused as to whether or not the word explaining is modifying the noun phrase a detailed blog because according to some grammar book I read:
If the VERB-ing modifier (present participle) appears after a clause and without a comma, then it modifies the preceding noun or noun phrase.
But in this case, the syntactic constituent immediately preceding explaining is last week, which is not a noun or noun phrase.
Can a present participial clause modify a more distant noun or noun phrase even without a mandatory written comma? That is what is actually confusing me, because some grammar book also says that when a participial phrase concludes a main clause and modifies a word farther back in the sentence that the last thing, you will need a comma.
But there is no comma in my newspaper’s sentence; why not? How can this still be grammatical in the English language without a written comma? Has the newspaper made a mistake in English grammar and created something that it not grammatical?
