resumptive modifier

A modifier that repeats a key word at the end of a sentence and then adds informative or descriptive details related to that word.

See also:

• Summative Modifier
• Amplification
• Apposition
• Appositive
• Postmodifier
• Premodifier
• Sentence Building With Appositives

Examples and Observations:

• "Hollywood has always been a cage--a cage to catch our dreams."
  (John Huston, quoted in the Sunday Times [UK], Dec. 1987)



• "For there we loved, and where we love is home,
  Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts . . .."
  (Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Homesick in Heaven," 1871)



• "The practice of spiritual exercise must begin with desire, the desire that the phenomenal world may become diaphanous and that true Being may shine through."
  (Thomas Kerns, "Spiritual Exercise." Yoga Journal, March 1976)



• "In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming, gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating--and true enough she didn't--a dragging, devitalizing ennui, which left its victims strewn about the living-room in various attitudes of prostration suggestive of those of the petrified occupants in a newly unearthed Pompeiian dwelling; an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly veiled insults, and which ended in ruptures in the clan spirit serious enough to last throughout the glad new year."
  (Robert Benchley, "Christmas Afternoon," 1921)



• "But, after all, what would be a gift that fulfills the condition of the gift, namely, that it not appear as gift, that it not be, exist, signify, want-to-say as gift? A gift without wanting, without wanting-to-say, an insignificant gift, a gift without intention to give?"
  (Jacques Derrida, Given Time. Trans. by Peggy Kamuf. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994)



• "The resumptive modifier often includes a that-clause, as these examples . . . illustrate:

  Remember that well-chosen verbs send a message to the reader, the message that the writer has crafted the sentence with care.
  
  That kind of agentless prose should send up a red flag, a signal that here's a candidate for revision.
  
  The reader assumes from such messages that the writer has certain doubts, doubts that perhaps others may have, thus connecting, as possible fellow doubters, the writer and the reader.

  In the following sentence from a book review about the work of Edith Wharton, the reviewer uses a dash instead of a comma to set off a resumptive modifier:

  Wharton depicted women caught between constraint and the possibilities of a new sexual freedom--a freedom that she herself enjoyed, though at a high cost.
  --Margaret Drabble

  . . . Coming at the end of the sentence, in the position of end focus, these modifiers are going to command the reader's attention. And, clearly, they offer the writer a way of adding information, information that might otherwise require a sentence of its own."
  (Martha Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar. Pearson, 2007)



• "To create a resumptive modifier find a key word, usually a noun, then pause after it with a comma, . . . then repeat it, . . . [and then] add a relative clause:

  Since mature writers often use resumptive modifiers to extend a sentence, we need a word to name what I am about to do in this sentence, a sentence that I could have ended at that comma, but extended to show how resumptive modifiers work."

  (Joseph M. Williams, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. Longman, 2003)