[lbo-talk] Linguistics query

[Arthur Maisel]

In English, the expectation is that modifiers will be as near as possible
to what they modify. With a series of adverbial prepositional phrases
indicating location you would want to have the most specific one closest to
the action: "He shot himself in the left temple of his head in the head of
a battleship floating in Santa Fe harbor on the western coast of the United
States."

One sort of dangling modifiers ("I shot an elephant in my pajamas") often
is the result of ignoring this principle.

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> In a Walter Moseley book, the sentence "he shot himself in the head in the
> head" occurs.
> Now it's obvious which head is architectural, which anatomic (one would not
> say "he shot himself in the wheat field in the head"), but what is the rule
> governing that?
>
> Carrol
>
>
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