I saw an interesting sentence due to play game;
She came to the city fleeing persecution in her home town.
If talking about only meaning, I understand the sentence. She ran away to the city for avoiding persecution from her home town. (if it's not, please fix me.)
But that verb-ing form after to + noun clause is really unfamiliar to me.
What's the name of that gerund rule? Is that even categorized? Is there some kind of omitted word behind the scene like that clause does?
For starters, fleeing persecution in her home town is called a gerund-participial clause. In your sentence it functions as an adjunct. Not always easy to establish which kind of adjunct. The most certain option is an adjunct of implicated reason.
She came to the city (because she was) fleeing persecution in her home town.
Note that your "to + noun phrase" does not require the gerund. It is not a structure, therefore, no need to look for a name for it. You could read your sentence as
She came to the city [in fear].
By replacing fleeing persecution in her home town with in fear, you can see how the gerund-participial clause is independent from the rest of the sentence, not required by it.
gerund-participial clause finds several either explanations of the difference between gerunds and participles and several StackExchange pages using more or less the full term as used here. At first blush I'd infer that gerund-participial is a term more frequently encountered on this site than away from it. Is that a wrong inference?
Commented
Aug 5, 2022 at 18:33
The example sentence:
She came to the city fleeing persecution in her home town.
is grammatically valid and natural, a fluent speaker might well say it.
It could be rephrased as:
[While] fleeing persecution in her home town, she came to the city.
Or the original could be considered a reduced form of:
She came to the city while fleeing persecution in her home town.
I don't know a specific name for this sort of construction. Not every sentence pattern needs to have a special name.
A few somewhat similar uses of gerunds would be:
- She went to the club looking for a new boyfriend.
- She rented an apartment, avoiding the cost of a mortgage.
- She came to wrok for is, operating a HAL-9000 computer
- She came to my office, performing an audit for the IRS.
- She came to the Remedy Center, performing Mozart's Requiem.
- She came to be one of the city's best known artists, inventing an entirely new genre.
