Happy to see her sister, she was about to cry.
I can see that this sentence works like a participle phrase, but this "happy to see her sister" directly starts with adjective. What is the grammar term for this phrase?
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It's called a "nominative absolute." Nominative because it applies to the subject or subject+predicate of the clause following; absolute because it stands free of the grammatical structure of the rest of the sentence.
deadrat
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When I looked it up, it gave me bunch of examples with a noun in front of an adjective or past participle phrase like this: The weather being rainy, we decided to postpone the trip. In the examples I saw, the noun was always in front of the adjective of the absolute phrase. Do I have to have noun, or is it OK to delete the noun if the noun in the absolute phrase is the same as the noun in the clause as above? – sooeithdk Sep 03 '15 at 21:15