Vietnamese EFL Learners’ Acceptability Judgments Towards Dangling Modifiers

This study aims to investigate the acceptability of different types of dangling modifiers in English by comparing how Vietnamese EFL learners and native English speakers evaluate them under syntactic and semantic conditions. Although prescriptive grammar traditionally condemns dangling modifiers as categorically unacceptable, their frequent appearance in authentic usage raises questions about how speakers perceive them. Two acceptability-judgment tasks—a syntactic task focusing on grammaticality and a semantic task emphasizing plausibility—were administered to thirty-two advanced Vietnamese learners and twenty native speakers. Four conditions were examined: a grammatical control and three types of dangling modifiers—undercover, undetected, and howling. Results show that (i) acceptability differs systematically across modifier types, (ii) semantic evaluation narrows contrasts by making implausible structures more tolerable, (iii) native speakers display relatively uniform ratings across conditions, lowering scores only when multiple controllers compete, and (iv) Vietnamese learners show stricter rule-based sensitivity. These findings identify dangling modifiers as a gradient acceptability phenomenon shaped by syntactic and semantic factors and underscore the need to balance grammatical precision with interpretive flexibility in EFL pedagogy.