Yes, you are absolutely right! That sentence needs the relative pronoun “that” (but followed by the definite article “the”) to functionally link the noun phrase “Northern Light Infantry pay stubs and ID cards Indian later claimed to have found on dead soldiers” with the relative clause “Indian later claimed to have found on dead soldiers insinuate a different story.” That linkage would have made it crystal clear that the fusion of that noun phrase and relative clause constitutes the subject of the sentence, with “insinuate” as operative verb and “a different story” as noun complement.
In the original sentence construction, however, the writer or editor had yielded to the trigger-happy tendency of some foreign news-service agencies to eliminate the relative pronoun “that” in complex sentences of that type. They do it ostensibly to streamline the construction of such sentences and make them easier to read. When done judiciously, that process does yield what’s known as an
elliptical sentence—a sentence that’s supposed to read right and sound right even with some of its grammatical parts obviously missing, with the reader expected to just mentally supply them.
However, when that process is carried out so recklessly in a longwinded sentence like the one you presented, the construction collapses in an incomprehensible heap of words. Indeed, a more circumspect and sensitive writer or editor would have sensed the danger of such grammatical surgery and would have decided to retain the “that” in the sentence, in which case it would have read clearly in the manner you suggested (but with the article “the” added after “that” to get rid of the ambiguous sense of its use), as follows:
“Northern Light Infantry pay stubs and ID cards
that the Indian later claimed to have found on dead soldiers insinuate a different story.”
But even if that sentence is now grammatically, semantically, and structurally airtight, it remains extremely difficult to comprehend because of its unfamiliar syntax. Note that its subject (the noun phrase “Northern Light Infantry pay stubs and ID cards that the Indian later claimed to have found on dead soldiers”) is so unnaturally long, and its verb (“insinuate”) not only so delayed in coming but deeply buried as well under that extended noun phrase. If I were the writer or editor of that sentence, in fact, I would have constructed that sentence in the passive voice for clarity and better reading comprehension, as follows:
“
A different story is insinuated by the Northern Light Infantry pay stubs and ID cards that the Indian later claimed to have found on dead soldiers.”
This is in keeping with the rule that the earlier the verb is delivered by a sentence, the clearer the sentence and the easier it is to understand.
RELATED READINGS:Deconstructing and understanding those puzzling elliptical sentencesThe excessive use of ellipses beclouds the sense of sentences
