This headline on the front page of today’s Guardian caught my eye for reasons both ecological and syntactic. See what you make of it before reading on:
In normal prose it might read: There are fears that a crawling, invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’. Headlines often forgo the existential there (‘dummy pronoun’) and its attendant verb is or are, the relative pronoun that, and the indefinite article a. But omitting all of them in this context generates ambiguities.
The adjective crawling can be reanalysed as a verb inflected for progressive tense: Fears [are] crawling. Maybe fears are crawling [that an] invasive fish could create a major disaster.
Or crawling could be read as a gerund, with Australia the grammatical subject that fears it: Australia fears crawling. This possibility should be precluded by the slash, the colour change, and the capital f in fears, but someone glancing at it absent-mindedly could take a step down that garden path. One person I showed it to read it as: Australia fears [that a] crawling, invasive fish could create a major disaster.
The clause invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’ is independent, which may reinforce an instinctive misreading: the comma then serves to splice the two parts of the headline instead of being analysed as a listing comma. (Cf. Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help.)
The headline on the story itself is straightforward:
You might notice that the article has an example of hypercorrect fewer (‘fewer than 10km south of the PNG mainland’), but I’ll leave discussion of that for a future post – even if fears are crawling that I’ll never get around to it.
I had no difficulty parsing the crash blossom Fears crawling, invasive fish… But it did strike me as quite opaque, and I paused to review my initial reading and see if there were plausible alternatives. How does it seem to you? Did you have any trouble interpreting it?
The headline for this BBC story was originally ‘Alps crash remains land in Germany’, with remains a particular source of ambiguity. It was soon revised to: ‘Germanwings crash: Victims’ remains land in Duesseldorf’.