A lupine crash blossom from the Netherlands
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Headline from NL Times (9 July 2023): "Sheep farmer injured after wolf attack in Wapse, ordered to be shot."
Poor sheep farmer; our condolences to his family.
Selected readings
- "Vocalizations of wolves and justices" (2/17/23)
- "Year of the ovicaprid" (2/15/15)
- "Crash blossoms" (8/6/09)
[Thanks to Jonathan Silk]
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 10, 2023 @ 7:09 am
Isn't this less of a classical "crash blossom" and more of just "bad grammar" (NONSTANDARD, I meant, "nonstandard" grammar. Sorry! sorry!)? I mean, unless I'm missing something, there's no grammatical way to shoot the wolf instead of the farmer here because the noun in the second phrase is "attack", not "wolf".
Cervantes said,
July 10, 2023 @ 7:24 am
Yes. There was a headline on the CNN website that stayed up for something like 3 days:
"After swimming from Cuba to Key West at age 60, Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews Diana Nyad"
Sounds to me like she should have interviewed him.
DaveK said,
July 10, 2023 @ 8:33 am
Just a thought: is there any possibility this kind of construction would be grammatical in Dutch?
Or for that matter, in any language? (I suppose there could be a language where the verbs for “ordered” or “shot” are different depending on whether you’re talking about a human being or an animal but it doesn’t seem likely.)
Robert Coren said,
July 10, 2023 @ 8:52 am
Not a crash blossom, but perhaps a bit of garden path: The heading of this post made me think it would have something to do with a genus of generally tall, slender, colorful perennial plants.
Polyspaston said,
July 10, 2023 @ 9:27 am
The only grammatical readings I can see here are (1) that the sheep, which a farmer in Wapse injured a wolf attack, have been ordered to be shot, or (2) that a sheep-farmer who was injured by the wolf attack, has been ordered to be shot.
I don't think the article can possibly be about (2), and (1) also seems rather unlikely.
Jerry Packard said,
July 10, 2023 @ 11:30 am
Once again, semantics (in the form of plausibility) trumps all. This is why we need to control for plausibility when we do psycholinguistic processing experiments.
David Marjanović said,
July 10, 2023 @ 12:03 pm
No.
There are plenty of languages with a human gender (all of Bantu for starters), and some polysynthetic languages indicate the gender of a verb's argument in the verb affixes (Bantu again, I think). So if "wolf attack" comes out as "attack by wolf", and "wolf" has a different gender from "sheep", it all works out.
That's made impossible by the comma.
Cervantes said,
July 10, 2023 @ 2:17 pm
And here's another one, from our local TV news web site:
"While conducting traffic enforcement on Route 12 in Gales Ferry, a 21-year old woman provided a false name and identification."
JPL said,
July 10, 2023 @ 5:51 pm
Instead of "ordered to be shot", the headline could just as well have used the phrase from the article, giving us, "Sheep farmer injured in wolf attack in Wapse, shot by police", since the shooting has already happened.
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 10, 2023 @ 6:24 pm
"injured after wolf attack" seems odd to me. Clearly the injury happened during the attack, so "injured" in the headline is apparently not referring to that event, but to the state in which the farmer found himself afterward.
Cervantes: Here's one I heard on the radio a couple of years ago (paraphrasing from memory): "After pummeling Puerto Rico, our meteorologist tells us where the storm is headed next."
Andrew McCarthy said,
July 10, 2023 @ 6:28 pm
In German, at least, I think if you said "Sheep farmer injured in Wapse by attack from wolf ordered to be shot" – though that's still ambiguous in terms of its referent – you would HAVE to put a comma between "wolf" and "ordered", because "ordered to be shot" is a subordinate clause and those are set off by commas in German. Not sure if the same holds for Dutch.
Peter Taylor said,
July 11, 2023 @ 4:02 am
@Andrew McCarthy, that phrasing in English suggests that the order to shoot the wolf came before the attack, which is not the case.
Benjamin Orsatti said,
July 11, 2023 @ 7:29 am
I'll bet all those speakers of agglunative / inflectional languages are getting a kick out of watching us scratch our heads at newspapers: "Oh, so _now_ you'd like an accusative or dative marker!"
David Marjanović said,
July 11, 2023 @ 12:52 pm
In German, the comma would go after "ordered", not before – if a passive "be ordered to" existed, that is. (Instead you need to mention, in the dative, to whom the order has been given, or you opt for something more like "is to be shot".)
unekdoud said,
July 15, 2023 @ 1:20 am
I'd say the sentence is almost irreparably ungrammatical without removing "attack" or adding "shot" into "wolf attack".
If we keep the original words, the former option is readable but the wolf appears late:
"Sheep farmer injured after attack in Wapse by wolf ordered to be shot"
The latter option results in an actual garden path or crash blossom:
"Sheep farmer injured after wolf, ordered to be shot, attack in Wapse"
"Sheep farmer injured after ordered shot wolf attack in Wapse"
The best option, as usual, is the slightly more verbose additional clause:
"Wapse sheep farmer injured in wolf attack, wolf ordered to be shot".
chris said,
July 15, 2023 @ 1:11 pm
"Wolf ordered to be shot" is also a bit odd, isn't it? Who would expect the wolf to understand, let alone obey, any such order? A dog might take orders but a wolf never will.
Surely what is actually happening is that an unspecified (in the headline, at least) third party was ordered to shoot the wolf; the wolf is the object of "shot" but not of "ordered". Which in fact the body of the article confirms.
"Police shoot wolf that injured sheep farmer in Wapse." (Not "Police shoot wolf after injuring sheep farmer in Wapse"!)
If someone is injured by a wolf I don't think it's necessary to explicitly specify that it was an attack. People have many ways to injure one another by accident but wolves have only their teeth.
Philip Anderson said,
July 16, 2023 @ 4:45 am
@chris
But not every attack leads to an injury.
Although it changes the emphasis slightly, what about “Wolf [ordered to be] shot after injuring/attacking sheep farmer.”
“Sheep farmer attack” would be more headlinese, but ambiguous.
Alan Post said,
July 19, 2023 @ 1:34 pm
"Police shoot Wapse sheep farmer attack wolf" would be proper headlinese, I think?
Alan Post said,
July 19, 2023 @ 2:07 pm
Or, if we're just talking about the order, we can go for the pure noun pile:
"Wapse sheep farmer attack wolf shooting order"
unekdoud said,
July 20, 2023 @ 9:43 am
Just for fun: a Wapse-sheep farmer from Wapse is a Wapse Wapse sheep farmer.
But all of these nouns are in Wapse, so there was a Wapse Wapse Wapse sheep farmer attack, a Wapse Wapse Wapse Wapse sheep farmer attack wolf…
…and a Wapse Wapse Wapse Wapse Wapse Wapse Wapse sheep farmer attack wolf shooting order.
(This comment brought to you by the Wapse Wapse Department of Wapse Redundancy Department.)