How to determine what part of the sentence a gerund phrase is modifying?
Most of us fall between the two extremes of Psalm 22 and the anti-psalm of the man facing Nazi oppression.
Welch, Edward T.. Side by Side (p. 39). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
Take this sentence for example. Does "facing Nazi oppression" modify "the man" or "the anti-psalm" or "Most of us"? My intuition says it should be the nearest one, which in this case is "the man". But is there any occasion where the gerund phrase modifies a farther object?
By the way, feel free to correct me if there is any misusage of grammatical terms.
Solution 1:
Most of us fall between the two extremes of Psalm 22 and the anti-psalm of [the man facing Nazi oppression].
The natural interpretation is that the gerund-participial clause in bold is a modifier in the bracketed noun phrase.
Gerund-participials (and past-participials) as modifiers in noun phrase structure are semantically similar to relative clauses: compare the man who is facing Nazi oppression.
It is possible to postpose a modifying clause, as in
I lent a book to Ed [containing all the information he needed],
where the bracketed subordinate clause is modifying "book".