Language Log

Not your usual modifier attachment problem

Collectors of infelicities in writing are especially fond of modifier attachment problems, which often lead to entertaining misinterpretations.  In one classic form of the problem, a modifier M is intended to apply to a phrase P1 preceding it, but ends up being understood as applying to a nearer phrase P2, as in this example from the Palo Alto Daily News of 4/19/05, in the Atherton police blotter:

(1) First block of Mosswood Way, 7:52 p.m.: A resident reported a large animal in a tree with tall and pointed ears.

The writer's intention was that the M with tall and pointed ears should modify the P1 a large animal, but unfortunately another modifier of P1, in a tree, intervenes between P1 and M and provides a nearer P2, a tree, for M to attach to, and for a moment we are visualizing a tree with tall and pointed ears.

Often, the seductive P2 is in fact inside P1, at the end of it, and we get "low attachment" rather than the intended "high attachment", as in this example from "Top officials to have salaries made public" in the PADN 7/7/05:

In this case, the M to dispel misconceptions that the public might have had was intended to apply to the whole clause Domanico presented a history of the hospital district and how the hospital is governed, but is likely to be (temporarily) understood as applying just to the clause the hospital is governed.

Now, for a change, a modifier attachment problem of the reverse sort, where M is intended to apply to P2 (at the end of P1) but ends up being mistakenly understood, for a moment, as applying to all of P1:


(From Sanford Schwartz, "White Secrets", a review of a Jacob van Ruisdael exhibition, in the New York Review of Books 2/9/06, p. 8.  Thanks to Johannes Fabian for pointing out the example to me.)

Modifier attachment problems are often treated as a type of dangling modifier, on the grounds that they exemplify a failure to put modifiers adjacent to (or at least very close to) the phrases they modify.  This is not a satisfactory analysis for some types of dangling modifiers, and it's generally unsatisfactory for modifier attachment problems, which illustrate a very different sort of problem.

[Digression: I suspect that the reason so many advice writers lump modifier attachment problems together with classic dangling modifiers is that they want to group writing problems under a few umbrella admonitions, like "Keep modifiers as close as possible to the things they modify".  In my experience, these abstract generalizations are not particularly useful for writing students, who have to learn to distinguish the various subtypes and find fixes for them separately.]

In Type 1 modifier attachment problems, as in (1), the difficulty is that there are two parallel postmodifiers for P1, and they cannot BOTH be adjacent to it.  If we move with tall and pointed ears up next to a large animal, we just end up with pointed ears in a tree instead of a tree with tall and pointed ears.  If we want to avoid the possibility of misinterpretation, some more significant rewording is called for, say:


In Type 2 modifier attachment problems, as in (2), both P1 and P2 are already adjacent to M; the question is whether M attaches to the bigger and higher P1, or to the smaller and lower P2.  One way to ensure that M attaches to P1 rather than P2 is to make it a premodifier of P1:


[Digression: In much of the advice literature, Type 2 modifier attachment problems are viewed as having P1 further from M than P2, so that the problem could be fixed by moving M up and making it adjacent to P1.  This view is made possible by the common assumption, in this literature, that modification is a relationship between a modifying expression and a modified WORD, not phrase.  In (2), the infinitival modifier to dispel misconceptions that the public might have had would be seen as modifying not a clause, but just the head verb of that clause, presented.  The simplest fix would then be to move the infinitival modifier up to follow the verb immediately, perhaps setting it off by commas:


This version, with the verb separated from its direct object by considerable intervening material, is awkward at best.  Further modification is needed.

There are good reasons for rejecting the idea that modification is, in general, a relationship between a modifying expression and a WORD (rather than the whole phrase this word heads), but exploring these reasons would take me too far afield.]

Now, finally, to (3).  Why is this different from (1) and (2)?  Why do we have a moment of contemplating the absurd idea that Ruisdael saw his own canvases of Bentheim Castle on a trip to the Dutch-German border, when clearly it must have been the castle that he saw on this trip (and then painted)?

The source of the problem is the parenthetical for instance.  If we remove it, there's no problem:


Now, low attachment, which was the problem in (2), gives the intended interpretation, without fuss or mess.  (High attachment is still possible, but unlikely to be made by most readers.)

Why is the for instance such a troublemaker here?  Because it sets off the whole NP Ruisdael's canvases of Bentheim Castle and focuses on the canvases denoted by this NP, so that the reader is at first likely to take the relative clause to be adding information about the canvases.

Such a subtle effect.  Throwing in a parenthetical, in particular the parenthetical for instance, which is so useful in organizing discourses, tilts parsing in the wrong direction.

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Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 22, 2006 08:09 PM