Caption on a photo on the front page of today’s New York Times:
A Somber Procession
First responders at the funeral of a father of two killed in the attack on NN
(where NN stands for the name of 45, TFG, the Orange Menace, Helmet Grabpussy; the attack was an attempted assassination). In principle, the PSP (past participial) phrase at the end of the caption — killed in the attack on NN — could be parsed with the preceding material in (at least) four different ways, as a predicative or in one of three ways as a modifier (which I’ll label VHA (very high attachment), HA (high attachment), and LA (low attachment). I doubt that either of the first two parsings would occur to any normal reader (though a mechanical parser would entertain them), but the last two are more imaginable.
To look ahead: ceteris paribus, LA is the favored parsing, but plausibility in context is a powerful effect and often favors HA. I was lured into understanding the caption with LA and had a lot of trouble shaking that parsing, despite its incongruity with the facts of the situation as I knew them and the real-world unlikelihood of this understanding.
The PSP phrase as predicative. In which case the caption is understood as a full sentence with the copula omitted, as in headlinese, as:
subject NP: first responders at the funeral of a father of two
+
predicate VP: (are/were) killed in the attack on NN
But in the actual event, no first responders were killed, much less first responders at anyone’s funeral.
The PSP phrase as modifier: VHA. To see that this is even theoretically possible, consider the NP
the funeral of a father of two presided over by the Rev. U.N. Owen
— in which the final PSP phrase presided over by the Rev. U.N. Owen modifies the large NP the funeral of a father of two, so that this PSP phrase is understood as conveying that this funeral was presided over by the minister in question.
But interpreting the PSA phrase in #1 — killed in the attack on NN — in a parallel fashion would have the funeral referred to in #1 killed in an attack, so that a literal understanding is semantically anomalous; the literal sense of kill (’cause the death of (a person, animal, or other living thing)’ (NOAD‘s sense 1a)) is incompatible with a direct object that denotes an event, like a funeral.
So to parse the PSA phrase in #1 with VHA, you have to understand kill figuratively, as ‘put an end to or cause the failure or defeat of (something)’ (NOAD‘s sense 2a); the PSA phrase must then be understood as conveying that the funeral in question was derailed in the attack. This is already an interpretive stretch (novel figurative readings do not readily occur to people unless they’re set up in the context), but in any case the photo that all this is caption to shows the funeral in progress, so it was not killed, by the attack or anything else.
The PSP phrase as modifier: What remains: HA of this modifier (conveying that a father of two was killed in the attack) and LA of this modifier (conveying that two (people) were killed in the attack).
As I noted above, LA is the generally favored parsing, but plausibility in context is a powerful effect and often favors HA. As it turns out, the LA reading not only is contrary to fact (only one person was killed in the attack, not two) but also requires that a father of two be understood as ‘one father (out of several) of two people’ (it’s possible, but rare, to have two or more fathers , so that this understanding of a father requires considerable support in context — support not available in #1).
HA of the modifier has neither of these problems. The NP a father of two there refers to one person, and the problem with a father doesn’t arise, since in #1 a father of two in the HA parsing is understood as ‘someone who is a father of two, someone who has two children’ (the ways that the indefinite article a(n) is used in English are intricate, a topic all on its own; here I’m just reporting on some relevant facts about these uses).
So HA of the PSP phrase is just fine in the real world, and it’s surely what the writer of the caption in #1 had in mind. But I was taken in by the lure of LA, and though I eventually realized why this parsing is wrong in fact and bizarre in meaning, it stuck with me for quite some time. A tribute to the power of LA, and maybe to the inflexibility of old age (at the age of 83, I’m still keen of mind, but somewhat slower in thought than I once was). I do wonder how many readers went, for a moment, for the peculiar LA parsing.
July 21, 2024 at 11:26 am |
To lose one child is a misfortune, but losing two is implausibly careless? (Of course, in real-life disasters, some victims are often related, because people spend time together with friends and family, so the death of two siblings and their father in quick succession isn’t wildly unlikely.)
July 21, 2024 at 12:08 pm |
Extra points for refraining from working a handbag into your comment.