Reduced clause

[pauleddy]

I am a UK native teacher.

I recently used this reduced adverbial clause sentence in a text:

Madrid seems hot and noisy after living in Venice.

The text was not to show red. clauses. I wanted to show stative verbs (seem, appear etc) to elementary Ss.
I know that there are other inelegant reductions like AFTER HAVING LIVED, but i wanted to avoid. There may be a tense clash too, but not, I believe, for natives (who wd understand implicitly).

Native colleagues and native non-teachers (my brother and kids) seem fine with this sentence. Some non-native teachers don't like it on grammar purist grounds, however.

Who is correct? Why?

Eddy

[Soup]

Hello Eddy

On my first read, I got what your colleagues got, a classic example of a dangling modifier:

• Madrid seems hot and noisy after living in Venice.
• Madrid after living in Venice seems hot and noisy.

Cf. Max seems happy after living in Venice.
Max after living in Venice seems happy.

On my second read, I got the meaning your native speaking colleagues and friends got:

• Madrid seems hot and noisy after (my) living in Madrid.

The assumption being, or rather native intuition tells us Madrid, a place, cannot live in Venice, and so the utterance in question is not ambiguous, not a dangling modifying, and perfectly understandable.

Who's right? Both groups, of course.