MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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How a preposition can make a life or death difference in a sentence

I received the very interesting e-mail below last June 14 from Mr. Oscar P. Lagman, Jr., an MBA professor and business newspaper columnist. It’s in response to My Media Watch posting last week that focused on the very high incidence of preposition misuse in the major Metro Manila broadsheets and TV news websites.

Joe,

May I comment on your reconstruction of this faulty sentence that appeared in media recently?

Below is your reconstructed sentence:

“Tensions ran high as the lawyers of Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia and the late vice governor Gregorio Sanchez, Jr. yesterday engaged in a verbal tussle and almost came to blows.”

My immediate reaction upon reading the sentence was: What, the lawyers of Gov. Garcia engaged Vice Gov. Sanchez, a dead man, in a verbal tussle and almost came to blows with him?

Should it have not been “Tensions ran high as the lawyers of Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia and of the late Governor Gregorio Sanchez yesterday engaged in a verbal tussle and almost came to blows”?

While on the Net with you, can I ask you this question: Why do we use the past tense when we say: “It’s about time that we did something about it”?

My reply to Oscar:

You are absolutely right in supplying the preposition “of” to my reconstruction of this original sentence from the Freeman (Cebu):

“Tensions ran high as the lawyers of Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia and the late vice governor Gregorio Sanchez, Jr. yesterday engaged in thrash talking resulting to one threatening to hit the other.”
(My Media English Watch: “Very frequent preposition misuse mars today's English journalism”)

After replacing the improper word choices and correcting the misuse of the phrasal verb “resulting to” in that sentence, I simply copied the rest of the sentence to come up with this reconstruction:

“Tensions ran high as the lawyers of Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia and the late vice governor Gregorio Sanchez, Jr. yesterday engaged in a verbal tussle and almost came to blows.”

I woefully missed out on the fact that this and the original sentence also need the preposition “of” before the noun phrase “the late vice governor Gregorio Sanchez, Jr.” to make the statement not only grammatically but also semantically correct. My reconstruction should then be corrected as follows:

“Tensions ran high as the lawyers of Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia and of the late vice governor Gregorio Sanchez, Jr. yesterday engaged in a verbal tussle and almost came to blows.”

Without the preposition “of,” as you have astutely pointed out, it absurdly appears that the late Vice Gov. Sanchez had come back to life, engaged the lawyers of Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia in a verbal tussle, and almost came to blows with them.”

This, I must say, dramatically demonstrates the crucial importance of prepositions in English. It could make a life-or-death difference to the protoganists in the action described by a sentence!

Now as to this other question of yours: “Why do we use the past tense when we say: ‘It’s about time that we did something about it’?”

That’s a tough grammar question, but after carefully scrutinizing the sentence, I have determined it to be a wishful statement in the subjunctive mood. It’s in the same class of subjunctive wishful statements as the following:

“I wish I knew.” (Its indicative form, “I wish I know,” is grammatically faulty.)

“She wishes you were not here.” (Its indicative form, “She wishes you are not here,” is likewise grammatically faulty.)

The hallmark of such wishful subjunctive statements is the use of the past tense of the operative verb instead of its present tense. This usage has become rare, but there it still is.

If I may add, Oscar, this made me ponder the grammatical legitimacy of this slogan of a Philippine-based budget airline: “It’s time everybody flies.” If we analyze it in the same way as “It’s about time that we did something about it,” we’d come to the inescapable conclusion that it’s also a wishful statement in the subjunctive mood. In other words, it’s grammatically and semantically wrong and need to be restated as “It’s time everybody flew.”

Of course, I expect that airline’s advertising agency to defend the current phrasing of that slogan and to justify it as an exercise of, well, advertising or literary license. I’d do the same if I were caught committing the same grammatical violation!

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SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

(1) Reuters: Semantically wrong phrasing

This is the lead passage of a news story in the GMA News website that had a tail end attribution to the Reuters news agency, so I have no immediate way of knowing whose handiwork this semantically flawed phrase in that first sentence is: “was jailed for 15 years on Thursday.” The absurd implication of that phrase is that the militant cleric had already served a 15-year jail sentence that, as if in a time warp, took place in just one day on that particular Thursday. The correct phrasing is, of course, “was sentenced last Thursday to 15 years in jail”—a phrasing that makes it clear that the convict is yet to serve that jail sentence.

Here then is that semantically wayward sentence as corrected:

“Indonesian militant cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in jail for helping plan a paramilitary group that aimed to kill the country's president, a sentence that could inflame hardcore Islamists who had vowed revenge.”

(2) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Misuse of the objective relative pronoun “whom”

The lead sentence above is grammatically and semantically flawed—and reads very badly indeed!—because of its misuse of the prepositional phrase “to whom President Aquino alluded.” It’s incorrect to use the objective case “whom” in that phrase construction because the antecedent subject, “pawnshop owner William Villarica,” is not the object of the relative clause that follows. Rather, it is the subject of that relative clause.

This grammatical problem can be fixed by rewriting that sentence as follows:

“The Department of Justice has recommended the filing of criminal charges against pawnshop owner William Villarica, who was alluded to by President Aquino in his first State of the Nation Address last year as someone who was able to afford an expensive sports car but neglected to pay his taxes.”

Another grammatically correct construction:

“The Department of Justice has recommended the filing of criminal charges against pawnshop owner William Villarica, who President Aquino had alluded to in his first State of the Nation Address last year as someone who was able to afford an expensive sports car but neglected to pay his taxes.”

(3) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Use of wrong verb tense

The lead sentence above misuses the simple past tense “were invited” to describe a repeated or habitual action that happened “in years past.” In English, repeated or habitual past actions are expressed through the use of the modals “would” or “used to” instead, as follows:

“In years past, as part of the annual Philippine Independence Day celebration, Filipino community leaders and the Philippine Consul General in the Bay Area would be invited to the San Francisco’s City Hall for the simple ceremony of unfurling the Philippine flag at the mayor’s balcony.”

A grammatically equivalent alternative is the “used to” construction:

“In years past, as part of the annual Philippine Independence Day celebration, Filipino community leaders and the Philippine Consul General in the Bay Area used to be invited to the San Francisco’s City Hall for the simple ceremony of unfurling the Philippine flag at the mayor’s balcony.”

(4) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Twin subject-verb disagreement errors

PHOTO CAPTION:
[Flood photo here]

Based on my own news journalism experience, a major broadsheet typically assigns probationary or cub reporters to do the captions for front-page news photos. This, I believe, is a big mistake. I think the writing of front-page captions is much too important and sensitive to be left to the caption-writing skills of rank tyros. I suspect this is what happened to the above caption, which has this outrageous error in subject-verb agreement: “Classes in this school has been cancelled.” The subject of that sentence being the plural noun “classes” and not the singular noun “school,” the operative verb should also have taken the plural form “have been cancelled” rather than the singular form “has been cancelled.”

Even more disappointing, this subject-verb agreement error in the photo caption is followed right afterwards by another such error in the lead sentence of the flood story itself:

In the lead sentence above, the subject of the sentence is the nominal group “over P400 million worth of crops and properties,” and its head noun is the singular “worth.” As I explained in a previous posting about the nominal group, a nominal group functions as though it is that noun itself. Since that head noun is the singular noun “worth,” it follows that the operative verb should also be in the singular form “has been wasted” rather than “have been wasted.” What happened in that lead sentence, though, is that the reporter or editor mistakenly thought that the referent noun is the plural noun phrase “crops and properties.”

Here’s how that lead sentence should have been constructed:

“Over P400 million worth of crops and properties has been wasted due to flooding in 11 rivers in Mindanao over the past three weeks, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said.”

(5) Manila Bulletin: Overwhelming modification of a noun

The lead sentence of the feature story above is grammatically and semantically ruined by the overwhelming modification of the noun “subjects,” with many of the modifiers in the phrase “probably one of the most favorite subjects of Filipino artists” totally unnecessary. Here’s a reconstruction of that sentence with all the extraneous modifying words knocked off:

“Dr. Jose Rizal is a runaway favorite subject of Filipino artists, which is just as well as he is the national hero.”

(6) Manila Bulletin: Badly constructed and badly phrased sentences

In the first paragraph, the verb phrase “are poised to strengthening its monitoring, control and surveillance” is grammatically flawed because of the mixed verb-infinitive-gerund construction “poised to strengthening,” a form that’s not allowed in English. The proper construction is “poised to strengthen”—minus the troublesome “-ing” that makes “strengthening” an odd-man-out gerund in what should be a simple infinitive, “to strengthen.”

In the second paragraph, the sentence is so confusing because a very long prepositional phrase, “during a recent meeting with the member agencies of the Coastal Law Enforcement Alliance in Region 7 (CLEAR),” has been inserted in the sentence without the benefit of punctuation (a pair of commas to set off the phrase from the main clause would be ideal). The problem is further compounded by the wrong use of the verb phrase “has stressed the need”; in keeping with the antecedent time frame for that action (“during a recent meeting”), that verb phrase should be in the simple past tense “stressed the need” instead. Also, the prepositional phrase at the tail end, “to report to them if they observe such violations,” is extremely wordy; it can simply be said as “to report such violations.”

So here’s that lead passage as corrected for these grammatical infelicities:

“Regional government agencies in Central Visayas, particularly those involved in law enforcement operations, are poised to strengthen its monitoring, control and surveillance against illegal coral traders particularly in this city following the confiscation of endangered coral species on various occasions.

“Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) 7 Regional Director Andres Bojos, during a recent meeting with the member agencies of the Coastal Law Enforcement Alliance in Region 7 (CLEAR), stressed the need to heighten the group’s operations to stop the illegal harvest of endangered coral species and urged the public to report such violations.”

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