unfortunate Gapping

[Joel S. Berson]

At 11/7/2007 03:48 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>Ed Quackenbush pointed me to a Yahoo News piece on Britain's most
>stupid laws --
>
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071106/od_afp/britainlawsoffbeat
>
>of which #7 is the unfortunate Gapping in:
>
>  The head of any dead whale found on the British coast automatically
>becomes the property of the king, and the tail of the queen.
>
>"of the queen" just wants to latch on to "the tail" as a
>postmodifier, in which case "the tail of the queen" is understood to
>be the second conjunct in a coordinate complement of "becomes".

"Mind the gap", as they say.

Joel

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