I just got a text message from a friend who was a lawyer, but (sensibly?) packed it in about five years ago. Obviously he still maintains a vague interest, because he directed my attention to an article in The Age yesterday about Gough Whitlam, and cited this excerpt:
Mr Whitlam, 92, famed as both a Latin scholar and former prime minister, laughed along with a crowd of Labor luminaries including…High Court judge Michael Kirby and family members including his wife, Margaret.
“Have I missed something?” texted my friend. “Did Kirby J get married??!!”
After I had finished laughing, I informed my friend it was just an example of thoughtless use of the personal possessive pronoun. I suppose the author presumed that people would know “his wife” was intended to refer to Gough’s wife Margaret.
2 Comments
I’m glad you can still worry about these sorts of things right now!
You’ll be pleased to know that how attachment of ambiguous bits of syntax works (i.e., which part of the syntactic tree “his wife” attaches too) is in fact exceptionally difficult to work out. There are numerous factors involved — people do it differently in different languages for almost no apparent reason, and things like the heaviness (length) of the internal constituents matters also.
For example, at least in my books, if you looked at:
“Mr Whitlam laughed along with Michael Kirby and family members including his wife”
then you would be likely to find that people would be more likely to attribute “his wife” to Mr Whitlam rather than Michael Kirby compared to the above, simply because there is simply less stuff between Mr Whitlam and his wife.
Ha ha, I’m just trying to keep my mind off the fact that my bad baby boy is now overdue! At least the obstetrician has said he’ll induce me if the bad boy doesn’t come soon.
You are right – there were just too many people listed in between Mr Whitlam and his wife, so you’d forgotten about Mr Whitlam by the time his wife was mentioned. The brain links “his wife” to the last mentioned man in the sentence (Kirby J). It would have really been better if the sentence had been separated into two.
Japanese is the only other language which I know in any detail – it’s quite different – it uses “particles” to indicate relationships between words. Word order doesn’t matter so much and the verb is at the end of the sentence.