The lead Canadian news item at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website right now is the revelation that two prominent pathologists have concluded that a little girl, for whose rape and murder a man has already served twelve years in prison, died of natural causes. There having been no crime, the man is of course innocent. Here is the first paragraph of the story:
Two experts have concluded that a man convicted of raping and killing a four-year-old Ontario girl in June 1993 actually died of natural causes.
That's all wrong, of course. The man is still alive, in prison. It's the little girl whom he allegedly killed who is dead, and the story is that she died of natural causes.
Linguistic errors in the news are hardly a rarity, but this one is unusual both for its severity and its nature. It isn't a typographical error, and indeed it doesn't result from any sort of small-scale mistake. A correct version would have been something like this:
Two experts have concluded that a four-year-old Ontario girl whom a man was convicted of raping and killing in June 1993 actually died of natural causes.
The correct and botched versions are grossly different - to transform one into the other you've got to move large chunks from one clause to another.
I suspect that the error is due to the differing difficulty of the syntax of the two sentences. In both cases the first-order subordinate clause, which expresses the conclusion reached by the two experts, consists of a subject noun phrase containing a relative clause followed by the predicate actually died of natural clauses. In the actual, erroneous, sentence, the subject of the main clause (of the conclusion), a man, is also the subject of the relative clause - a stand-alone equivalent of the relative clause would be A man was convicted of raping and killing a four-year-old Ontario girl in June 1993. In the correct version, the subject of the main clause, the little girl, is the object of the relative cause. A stand-alone equivalent of the relative clause would be: A man was convicted of raping and killing her in June 1993. Sentences in which the grammatical role of a noun phrase is the same in the main clause and the relative clause seem to be easier to process. Some languages reportedly have only this type of relative clause.
What seems to have happened here is that the author had difficulty formulating the correct sentence, came up with what appeared to be a less awkward version, and went with the latter without realizing that it said something quite different. Or it may be that the author of the piece got it right and that it was an editor whose "correction" turned it into an error.
Posted by Bill Poser at September 13, 2005 05:42 PM