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MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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I am inviting Forum members to team up with me in doing My Media English Watch. This way, we can further widen this Forum’s dragnet for bad or questionable English usage in both the print media and broadcast media, thus giving more teeth to our campaign to encourage them to continuously improve their English. All you need to do is pinpoint every serious English misuse you encounter while reading your favorite newspaper or viewing your favorite network or cable TV programs. Just tell me about the English misuse and I will do a grammar critique of it.

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Expect mayhem when the object of the preposition strays too far

By definition, the object of the preposition is a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that follows a preposition and completes its meaning. It’s the thing that the prepositional phrase is referring to; in the sentence “The refugees begged for food all day long,” for instance, “for food all day long” is the prepositional phrase, “for” is the preposition, and “food” is the object of the preposition—the thing that the prepositional phrase is referring to. (“All day long” is, of course, an adverbial phrase that modifies the verb “begged” in that sentence.)

For clarity’s sake, the object of the preposition should be positioned close to the preposition, if possible right beside it. To use media’s favorite pairing phrase in crime stories, they should always come in tandem, as in “asked for bribes,” “talked about conspiracy,” and “dealt with corruption.” There’s one notable exception to this, though: preposition stranding, in which the object of the preposition is moved forward to the front of the clause, as in “What conclusion did you come up with?” and “They still don’t know what the justice secretary will charge them of?” Except for this positioning peculiarity, it’s best to play safe with our syntax by observing the in-tandem rule for the preposition and its object.

Now let’s examine a particularly instructive example of what happens when this in-tandem rule is overlooked or violated. I am referring to this lead sentence of a recent news story about the violent hostilities in Zamboanga City in the Philippines (underscoring mine):

Army official: “The end of crisis is near. Let’s pray!”

MANILA, Philippines - As Zamboanga City gradually returns to normalcy with its businesses opening up, a ranking military official urged Filipinos to pray for the crisis brought about by the supporters of Nur Misuari to end.

Lt. Col. Harold Cabunoc, 7th Civil Relations Group Commander, on Friday took to Twitter to post news from the battlefront and observations on the most likely dénouement of the conflict, now on its 12th day.

What is that lead sentence telling us?

Disconcertingly, it sounds as if Lt. Col. Cabunoc is saying in a rather slippery way that Nur Misuari’s supporters have brought an end to the Zamboanga City crisis—an eventuality that, of course, is far from the truth. It’s evident that the intended sense of that sentence has been garbled, making it say the exact opposite of what it meant to say.

What’s the culprit that’s causing the grammatical mayhem in that sentence? To identify and catch it, let’s knock off the introductory prepositional phrase of that sentence and just focus on the main clause:

“A ranking military official urged Filipinos to pray for the crisis brought about by the supporters of Nur Misuari to end.”

Hmmm… We can see clearly now that the trouble is caused by the improper construction of the prepositional phrase “pray for the crisis brought about by the supporters of Nur Misuari to end.” Here, the operative preposition is “for” but the object of the preposition—what the Filipinos are being urged to pray for—is nowhere to be found. It obviously couldn’t be the noun “crisis” or the noun phrase “the supporters of Nur Misuari.” And while it seems plausible, it couldn’t be “to end” either because it’s an infinitive, not a noun. We obviously have a serious grammatical impasse here.

So how do we resolve that grammatical impasse?

We must make that main clause work properly by supplying a legitimate object for the preposition “for.” Recall that by definition, that object of the preposition should be a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that follows the preposition and completes its meaning, and from the sense and logic of Lt. Col. Cabunoc’s statement, that object of the preposition could only be “the end” to the crisis. But that object of the preposition had wrongly taken the form of the infinitive “to end” and had strayed too far from the preposition to do its job properly.

There’s a simple way to make the infinitive “to end” serviceable as an object of the preposition: convert it to the noun form “the end” and then position it in tandem with the preposition “for,” as follows:

“As Zamboanga City gradually returns to normalcy with its businesses opening up, a ranking military official urged Filipinos to pray for the end to the crisis brought about by the supporters of Nur Misuari.”

Now the grammatical mayhem is gone and everything is in its proper place in that lead sentence.

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