Firstly, ing-clauses may often be used either to describe something intrinsic about the statement in the main clause
('He communicated using a radio' = 'He communicated by radio') (restrictive)
or to tack on additional information
('He communicated, using a radio' = 'He communicated; he did this by radio') (non-restrictive).
But what sort of additional information may be added using ing-clauses? And are there any restrictions we should be aware of?
This 2015 post at Helping Writers become Authors.com – K M Weiland by Eliza Dee has very useful analysis of how ing-clauses are used (note the older 'phrasal' analysis is used) (amended):
... [There sometimes seems to be an implication] that, because it’s
the present participle that’s involved, there’s somehow a requirement
that the relationship the participial phrase indicates must be one of
simultaneity.
The problem is, it just isn’t true. ... [T]his supposed rule is not
now, nor has it ever been a feature of English grammar, descriptive or
prescriptive or otherwise. I haven’t even been able to find any advice
along these lines that’s older than a few years, nor any that appears
in any reliable grammar, usage or linguistics text, and when I asked
my editors’ groups about it last year, in search of the source of the
bad advice, none of the members there even knew what I was talking
about or had ever heard of such advice being given. One did, however,
point me in the direction of a very dry but extremely
relevant-to-this-discussion linguistics text, Free Adjuncts and
Absolutes in English: Problems of control and interpretation, by Bernd
Kortmann, from which I’m drawing a lot of what I’ll go on to say
below.
There’s nothing whatsoever technically wrong in a sentence like
- Tying her shoe, Josie heads out of the house.
The fact that the two events cannot logically be simultaneous is not a
problem. In fact, present participial phrases are what Kortmann
describes as “semantically indeterminate”—that is, they can mean
different things, in terms of the relationship between the phrase and
what it modifies, depending on context. As Kortmann explains, such
constructions are “unmarked for tense and mood. Constructions without
a perfect-participial head also neutralize the aspectual distinction
‘imperfective/perfective (progressive/non-progressive)’”. That last
bit means, in linguistics jargon, that present participial phrases not
only don’t tell us tense, they don’t tell us whether an action was
completed (unless the perfect participial, eg 'having done something',
is used).
Moreover, “whether the relationship holding between these
constructions and the matrix clause [that is, the clause modified by
the participial phrase] is a temporal, causal, conditional, etc., or
an adverbial one at all, needs to be determined for each individual
instance”. So not only is simultaneity not required, but 'temporal' in
general is only one type of relationship these constructions can
indicate.
One such relationship is, indeed, [just a basic] Simultaneity, but
there are numerous others, including:
Anteriority ('Sitting down in his favourite armchair, he took out his pipe.')
Posteriority ('She left her apartment, slamming the door.') –Note that the placement of the participial phrase is what tends to
distinguish anteriority from posteriority; compare “He sat down,
crossing his legs” with “Crossing his legs, he sat down”–the latter is
illogical because no logical relationship between the phrase and the
matrix clause, temporal or otherwise, comes to mind
Conditionality (this one’s a bit trickier to understand, but for example, in a sentence like, 'He was a terrible husband, putting it
mildly', the idea of the modifier is something like 'if we are to put
it mildly') [a comment clause: a pragmatic marker]
Instrumentality ('Using the knife, he cut his meat.')
Manner ('The little girl walked to school, skipping all the way there.')
Accompanying circumstance ('She stood in the hallway, wearing a red dress'– this is superficially similar to simultaneity, but not the
same, as you wouldn’t say “she stood there at the same time as she was
wearing a red dress” – it wouldn’t be logical)
Concessivity (meaning something like 'although', as in 'Knowing the consequences, she broke the rule anyway.')
Causation ([Hammering the cliffs, the incessant waves finally brought down the famous sea-arch.])
Result ('He ran very fast in the footrace, coming in second.')
Purpose [/ reason (involving a logical course of action taken)] ('He slowed down, avoiding a person he didn’t want to run
into.') (The default reading here is that intent was involved.) / ('He telephoned saying that he was not coming the party.') (Example by @Eglantine; few would argue that this does not address purpose.)
(He telephoned saying that he was not coming the party.)
The examples above are my own [I've given a correct causative, EA],
but all the semantic categories are from the Kortmann text. ... Of
course, whether they’re stylistically preferable in a given context is
a different question, and a much more subjective question....
This is a very useful breakdown of semantic usages of present-participial clauses. I've given it for a complete overview, though the example of the instrumentality usage is (apart from the fronting) a perfect match. So an adverbial showing instrumentality, not method.
