The museum displays

[akhp77]

Source: Manhattan GMAT Verbal Strategy Guides 4th Ed, Page 59

Wrong; The museum displays the work of a wide variety of artists, from those who are world-renowned to who are virtually unknown.

Right: The museum displays the work of a wide variety of artists, from those who are world-renowned to those who are virtually unknown.

I would like to know that what is the role of comma before "from"?
Why do we need that?


Regards
Akhilesh Prasad

[StaceyKoprince]

A comma followed by a prepositional phrase most commonly indicates an adverbial modifier. The stuff after the modifier modifies the entire preceding clause.

[akhp77]

Hi Stacey,

It seems to be a new adverbial modifier to me.

THOSE refers to artists.
I understood that stuff after comma modify artists and provide their range.

Can I write like this?
The museum displays the work of a wide variety of artists, who range from world-renowned to virtually unknown.

Can you please explain me that how it (original post) is an adverbial modifier? How does it extend the meaning of whole clause.

[mschwrtz]

"The museum displays the work of a wide variety of artists, from those who are world-renowned to those who are virtually unknown."

I think that you meant to write that the phrase "from those who are world-renowned to those who are virtually unknown" seemed to you to be a noun modifier, rather than an adverbial modifier. After all, you go on to suggest that the phrase modifies "a wide variety of artists," and you suggest that you could gloss the phrase with a relative clause.

Stacey is right that a preposition following a comma usually signals an adverbial phrase. (By the way, though this rule-of-thumb about commas with prepositional phrases sounds like the rule about commas with -ing words, remember that the rule about commas with -ing words is much more reliable.)

You are right--if I understand you correctly--that a preposition can sometimes signal a noun modifier, even when that preposition follows a comma. Is this that sort of exceptional case?

Probably the best answer is "Who cares?" There's no split around this issue, so don't go looking for trouble. I mention this now because I doubt that the distinctions we need to draw to understand the role of that comma are really germane to success on the GMAT. But here we go....

Consider phrases of the sort "from X to Y." There are a few stock expression in English of this sort, many of them suggesting the full range possible: "from soup to nuts" (the first and last courses in a certain sort of meal), "from alpha to omega" (the first and last letter in the Greek alphabet, and an allusion to Revelations), "from A to Z." Just as Stacey suggests, when these are used to modify nouns, they don't generally follow commas, and when they are used to modify clauses, they do.

For instance, Dorothy Parker once wrote of Katherine Hepburn "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Notice that the lack of a comma suggests that the gamut runs from A to B. If Ms. Parker had written "She runs the gamut of emotions, from A to B." We might have understood her to mean that Ms. Hepburn runs from A to B. But we might not have. Commas do other work in some such sentences.

In the sentence we care about, without the comma it would sound as though the sentence was giving us the hometowns of the artists, "The museum displays the work of a wide variety of artists, from..." I'm waiting to read Des Moines. We need the comma to prevent that misreading.

There are some other subtleties I'm going to leave out here, including, I'm sure, some I've missed myself.