Sentence without subject

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mybabyblue

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"Summing up the results across the series of studies, Niemyjska and Parzuchowski concluded that their new measure suggested that people who tend to hold sympathetic magical beliefs about their partner’s objects also are more likely to show a lack of critical judgment when it comes to superstitious thinking."

Today, I came accross that sentence above and had difficulties to understand the subject of the bold text. Can you help me to understand what is the subject of the bold text?
Thanks.
 
Niemyjska and Parzuchowski.
 
Summing up the results across the series of studies, Niemyjska and Parzuchowski concluded that their new measure suggested that people who tend to hold sympathetic magical beliefs about their partner’s objects also are more likely to show a lack of critical judgment when it comes to superstitious thinking.

Like most non-finite clauses, the underlined gerund-participial clause has no overt subject.

But in a sense we understand such clauses as having a subject. In order to establish what it is, we sometimes rely on syntactic determination, and sometimes we have to rely on inference.

Examples like yours fall close to the boundary between the two. The non-finite clause is functioning as a supplementary adjunct and here the missing subject is retrievable by looking at the subject of the matrix clause. It provides a plausible subject, and there is no other candidate in the vicinity, so we understand the subject to be Niemyjska and Parzuchowski.
 
"Summing up the results across the series of studies, Niemyjska and Parzuchowski concluded that their new measure suggested that people who tend to hold sympathetic magical beliefs about their partner’s objects also are more likely to show a lack of critical judgment when it comes to superstitious thinking."

NOT A TEACHER


Mybabyblue, that kind of writing is quite elegant and would probably, I feel, be used mostly in writing or in a formal speech.

In ordinary conversation, most people would, I feel, express that idea something like this: "Niemyjska and Parzuchowski, who had summed up the results across the series of studies, concluded that their new measure suggested that ...."
 
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