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I noticed an article in Los Angeles Herald, Volume XLIII, Number 304, 22 October 1918: Link.

The title says:

Influenza-Crazed He Slays His Family

Here 'Influenza-Crazed' seems to modify 'He'. Were there a comma, it could have modify the whole sentence, as 'bewildered' does in the following sentence:

Bewildered, the kid fell to the ground and cried out loud.

But this is not the case. As we can clearly see the article in images, the whole sentence is without breaks.

In some exclamations did I see the attributive modifications on subjective pronouns, as in:

Poor me! Poor you!

But I think they do not usually (in modern English) go as far to form a usual sentence as: "Poor me had nothing to eat but a piece of bread for a whole week."

Maybe in 1918, the time in which article was written, this was more or less acceptable?

Namnamseo
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    If it's a title "normal" rules don't apply. – Hot Licks Nov 02 '20 at 15:34
  • The AdjPs "influenza-crazed" and "bewildered" are predicative adjuncts with "he" and "the kid" respectively as predicands, but they are of the supplementary kind, not the modifying kind. The absence of a comma (slightly compressed headline stuff) does not affect the analysis. – BillJ Nov 02 '20 at 16:07
  • 'Exhausted he rests' = 'Exhausted, Jo rests' not 'Exhausted Jo rests [whereas the other Jo runs the final 6 miles without a hitch]'. The commaless absolute rather than attributive analysis is pragmatically forced, if non-standard. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 02 '20 at 16:22
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    That "title" Influenza-Crazed He Slays His Family is *over a hundred years old. And if you look at it carefully, you'll see that it's very deliberately typeset over two lines, with just Influenza-Crazed* on the first line, even though there's plenty of room to include the word *He* there as well. Clearly the typesetter wanted to separate the text into two distinct elements, but had to deal with the fact that by convention we don't (and didn't) use commas or full stops in newspaper headlines (colons seem to be okay though). – FumbleFingers Nov 02 '20 at 16:45
  • The supplement is not a clause, so it cannot possibly be an absolute construction. And since it's not a modifier, we can't call it attributive either. – BillJ Nov 02 '20 at 17:17

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