Senator Grassley’s side business in childhood psychiatry
February 19, 2011 at 3:56 pm noahmotion 1 comment
From this article on conflicts of interest in medicine comes a hum-dinger of bad writing. I’ll defer to Josh for a more syntactically informed analysis and just point out that the most natural reading of the following sentence has “he” referring to Senator Grassley rather than Biederman, the intended referent:
In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007.
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Entry filed under: Bad Writing, Syntax. Tags: .
1. cmdrkoenig | February 20, 2011 at 12:58 am
You know, I’m actually not sure what the standard treatment of parentheticals is! The relevant question would be whether they attach as adjuncts (in which case this is probably a Condition B violation), or whether they’re free insertions (in which case I assume they’re adjoined to CP, and thus probably irrelevant, though POSSIBLY inducing a Condition C violation – although if so that would presumably be true for either interpretation since Condition C is usually taken to have an unrestricted domain). I just don’t know.
But I don’t have the feeling this sentence is ungrammatical in anyway, it’s just difficult to interpret. So, therefore, neither of the above, and the problem is purely pragmatic. If that’s right, then parentheticals are discourse related to the rest of the sentence, and you’d have to ask someone who does discourse semantics (like Larry Moss, actually!) what’s going on. Presumably, there’s just some kind of stack that resolves the pronoun to whatever the closest nominal entity is, and getting the intended interpretation requires overwriting the default resolution, hence the problem.
In any case, yes, bad writing.