Question e-mailed by Jhumur Dasgupta (August 29, 2013): Dear Jose,
I don’t know how to post this query in your Forum, so I am mailing my question instead. Can you please explain whether the sentence below from a news agency is correct? If I am not wrong, I see the “moving closer to banning its broadcasts” does not refer to the appropriate subject.
The sentence in question:
“Egypt’s official news agency says the interim government has deemed Al-Jazeera's local affiliate a national threat, moving closer to banning its broadcasts.”
Regards,
Jhumur
My reply to Jhumur:Yes, surprising as it may seem, this admittedly confusing sentence construction from Associated Press is acceptable by modern journalistic standards: “Egypt’s official news agency says the interim government has deemed Al-Jazeera's local affiliate a national threat, moving closer to banning its broadcasts.” It’s actually a doubly ellipted version of the following sentence, which dropped the relative pronoun “that” twice for brevity and ease of articulation:
“Egypt’s official news agency says
that the interim government has deemed Al-Jazeera’s local affiliate a national threat
and that it is moving closer to banning its broadcasts.”
In this complete, unellipted form, it’s very clear that the doer of the action “moving closer to banning its broadcasts” is “the interim government,” which is the same one that “has deemed Al-Jazeera's local affiliate a national threat.” Many English-language journalists engage in this kind of journalistic shorthand and expect readers to just supply the missing “that” mentally each time it is dropped. This type of ellipsis can work rather nicely and can make the sentence streamlined and more succinct when there’s only one action and one doer of the action, as when we drop the second action, “moving closer to banning its broadcasts,” from the original sentence that you presented:
“Egypt’s official news agency says
[that] the interim government has deemed Al-Jazeera’s local affiliate a national threat.”
As a rule, elliptical sentences consist of two independent clauses, one containing the grammar elements the other has left out. The independent clause with the missing elements is the elliptical clause—an abbreviated adverb clause stripped of its subject and verb. When done sensibly, ellipsis can gracefully knock off repetitive words and phrases from a sentence, thus making it simpler and easier to read.
The problem though is that some news reporters and their editors just don’t seem to know when not to do ellipses any further, and I daresay that the Associated Press overdid it in this case and obfuscated the meaning of the sentence as a result. Indeed, it’s no longer clear in that sentence what actor is “moving closer to banning its broadcasts,” making this clause virtually a dangling modifier to readers not wise to the ways of ellipsis-prone journalists.
