Author Topic: Misuse of restrictive relative clause makes zombies of dead war veterans  (Read 2501 times)

Joe Carillo

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By midweek last week, I was delighted to find that the four major Metro Manila broadsheets were holding forth admirably well with their English. I could hardly find any major grammar and usage errors in their major stories. Indeed, all I found last Wednesday (October 6) in the four broadsheets was only one problematic sentence each that’s instructive enough to be critiqued here. They are as follows:

(1) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Misuse of restrictive relative modifying clause

Quote
Dead veterans still get state pensions, Senate hearing told

MANILA, Philippines—Thousands of veterans, who have been dead for two or three years, continued to receive state pension, an official revealed during a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Philippine Veterans Affairs Office (PVAO) administrator Ernesto Carolina disclosed during the Senate hearing on the budget of the Department of National Defense that his office was “cleansing the list of pensioners.”

The lead sentence above misuses the relative modifying clause “who have been dead for two or three years” by setting it off from the main clause with a pair of commas. This is grammatically and semantically wrong because that clause is a restrictive modifying clause that’s intended to be integral to the noun phrase “thousands of veterans who have been dead for two or three years,” which as a whole functions as the subject of the sentence. As such, it doesn’t need that pair of commas. That sentence should then be rewritten as follows:

Thousands of veterans who have been dead for two or three years continued to receive state pension, an official revealed during a Senate hearing Tuesday.”

Expectedly, of course, some jaded editors and news reporters might think that this grammatical correction is no great shakes, and that the presence of those commas actually clarifies what that sentence means to say. Well, they are dead wrong. With those two commas on board, the clause “who have been dead for two or three years” becomes nonessential to the sentence—meaning to say that it can be dropped without unduly changing or distorting the meaning of the sentence. This isn’t the case, though. Without that modifying clause, the sentence will read as follows: “Thousands of veterans continued to receive state pension, an official revealed during a Senate hearing Tuesday.” This is obviously a trivial statement—an everyday state of affairs that’s no news at all.

Let’s look at that sentence again with the pair of commas is present: “Thousands of veterans, who have been dead for two or three years, continued to receive state pension, an official revealed during a Senate hearing Tuesday.” This is a semantically flawed sentence that makes zombies of those thousands of veterans, dead for two or three years now but—if that statement is to be believed—are still very much with us in the here and now and continuing to receive their state pensions. Weird and absurd, isn’t it?

So my friendly advice is: Use that pair of commas only for nonrestrictive or nonessential relative clauses, and absolutely do away with it in the case of restrictive or essential relative clauses. This really isn’t such a difficult thing to do.

(2) The Philippine Star: Faulty grammar for grading of P-Noy’s performance

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Senators give Noy fair grade for 1st 100 days
 
MANILA, Philippines - President Aquino’s former colleagues at the Senate gave him a fair grade for his performance during his first 100 days in office.

Maverick Sen. Joker Arroyo said the President “unqualifiedly deserves high marks” because of the enormous trust and faith of the people in him that remains steadfast and unwavering.

“That is something. This is, after all, the true measure of leadership. This augurs well for the country,” Arroyo said.

I’ll be very frank: I’ll give a grade of “Barely passing” in English grammar to the first sentence of that lead passage. Take a closer look at it: “President Aquino’s former colleagues at the Senate gave him a fair grade for his performance during his first 100 days in office.” Do we take it then that President Aquino’s colleagues at the Senate were “fair” in grading his performance but forgot to give him an actual grade? Or that they actually gave him a grade of “Fair” for his performance? Mind you, these are two entirely different things.

Anyway, I think it’s fair to assume that our honorable Senators were fair when they did that elementary grading task, so they must have given to President Aquino a grade of “Fair.” If this is the case, then that lead sentence should be corrected and rewritten as follows:

“President Aquino’s former colleagues at the Senate gave him a grade of “Fair” for his performance during his first 100 days in office.”

(3) Manila Bulletin: Unhyphenated adverb-adjective modifiers; wrong phrasal verb

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PAL Employees Going on Strike this October

MANILA, Philippines (Xinhua) - The Department of Labor and Employment-National Conciliation and Mediation Board’s (DOLE-NCMB) last ditch effort to reconcile the differences between flag carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) management and its cabin crew union on labor issues failed on Tuesday.

In a statement, the Flight Attendants and Stewards Association of the Philippines (FASAP) said that it will push with its planned strike by the end of October and first week of November.

This is a wire-service story, so we really don’t know where the grammar errors in the lead passage above originated. In any case, I’d like to call attention to the grammatical and semantic problems created by the noun phrases “last ditch effort,” “flag carrier Philippine Airlines,” and “cabin crew union,” then to the erroneously worded verb-phrase “will push with its planned strike.”

First, we need to remember this rule for ensuring clarity in English grammar: When adverb-adjective phrases are used to modify a noun up front, we need to hyphenate them if the adverb doesn’t end in “-ly.” For instance, we don’t just write, “Her long ailing husband made a dramatic recovery”; we must hyphenate “long ailing” as “long-ailing” and write the sentence as follows: “Her long-ailing husband made a dramatic recovery.” The first sentence with the unhyphenated “long ailing husband” means an “ailing husband” who happens to be “long” (whatever that means), but the second sentence with the hyphenated “long-ailing” means that the husband had been ailing for a long time now. There’s a huge semantic difference between the two.

In the same token, for them to do their modifying jobs properly, we need to hyphenate the modifiers in these three noun phrases in the sentence in question—“last-ditch effort,” “flag-carrier Philippine Airlines,” and “cabin-crew union.” For without the hyphen, the modifying words “last ditch” literally mean “the last, long narrow excavation dug in the earth”; with the hyphen, they figuratively mean “waged with desperation or unyielding defiance.” Without the hyphen, the modifying words “flag carrier” literally means just anything that carries a flag; with the hyphen, they mean “national airline” in the context of aviation. Without the hyphen, the words “cabin crew union” could be misinterpreted as a “crew union” of a “cabin” (whatever absurd thing that means); with the hyphen, it clearly means a union composed of “a cabin’s crew members.”

Finally, in the second sentence of the lead passage, the verb phrase “will push with its planned strike” is improperly worded. The correct phrasal verb form needs the word “through” after “push,” as follows: “will push through with its planned strike.”

So, as a whole, that problematic lead passage should be corrected as follows:

“The Department of Labor and Employment-National Conciliation and Mediation Board’s (DOLE-NCMB) last-ditch effort to reconcile the differences between flag-carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) management and its cabin-crew union on labor issues failed on Tuesday.

“In a statement, the Flight Attendants and Stewards Association of the Philippines (FASAP) said that it will push through with its planned strike by the end of October and first week of November.”

(By the way, I find the first sentence of the lead passage above still confusing even with all the corrections we’ve done to it. This is because its operative verb, “failed,” is no less than 17 words away from the noun form that’s doing the action, “last-ditch effort.” I suggest the following rewrite to make the sense of that sentence much clearer and more easily understood:

“The Department of Labor and Employment-National Conciliation and Mediation Board (DOLE-NCMB) failed last Tuesday in its last-ditch effort to reconcile the differences on labor issues between flag-carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) management and its cabin-crew union.”

As we can see, the above construction advances the operative verb “failed” to a position in the sentence where it can do a succinct, optimal job.) 
 
(4) The Manila Times: Subject-verb disagreement; use of wrong tense

Quote
Bus firms join efforts in saving Pasig River

Efforts to save the Pasig River has received a new boost after various public utility bus operators pledge their support to the scheduled 10.10.10 Run for Pasig River, organized by ABS-CBN Foundation’s Kapit Bisig Para Sa Ilog Pasig.

ABS-CBN Foundation Managing Director Gina Lopez signed a memorandum of agreement with bus companies under the Integrated Metro Bus Operators Association headed by Claire de la Fuente, who agreed to provide bus units for the participants of the marathon.

(a)   Improper use of the present perfect tense: Although the timeline of the verb’s action is not specified in the sentence (obviously an inadvertent omission), it’s clear that it is very recent—probably as recent as “yesterday” as news reports of this kind go. Also, that action is clearly indicated as having immediately followed the pledging of support by the public utility bus operators. The use of the present perfect “has received” is therefore not advisable here; the simple past “received” would be better.
(b)   Subject-verb disagreement: In the first sentence, the operative noun in the clause “Efforts to save the Pasig River has received a new boost” is the plural noun “efforts,” which is indefinite in character. It would be much better to use the  singular, definite collective form “the effort.” (The singular verb form “has received” is also wrong; since the noun “efforts” is plural, that verb form should the plural “have received” instead.)
(c)   Use of wrong tense: In that same sentence, since the action being reported happened in the past, the present-tense “pledge their support” is incorrect; it should be the past-tense form “pledged their support” instead.

That first sentence should then be corrected as follows:

The effort to save the Pasig River received a new boost yesterday when various public utility bus operators pledged their support to the scheduled 10.10.10 Run for Pasig River organized by ABS-CBN Foundation’s Kapit Bisig Para Sa Ilog Pasig.”
« Last Edit: October 07, 2010, 07:56:24 AM by Joe Carillo »