SC is not a professional musician, but he frequently makes use of pro music suppliers to buy test equipment and spare parts. As a result of this, he's on a couple of mailing lists, including a rather enjoyable one from a company called Musician's Friend. Every week, the company sends out an e-mail with a list of weekly specials, which always includes a link to a list of "on this date"-type trivia. This week's e-mail contained the teaser:
Join us as our Week in Review reveals what femme rocker's concert was the target of a chainsaw protest in the Northwest and who swore off rock 'n' roll after getting religion.
Your host interpreted this to mean that there existed a single person who had three properties: 1) was female, 2) gave a concert that was protested, and 3) swore off rock'n'roll. As it happens, that was the wrong parse of this sentence. The correct answers (available here) are:
1957, in Sidney, Australia, Little Richard announces his intention to give up rock and roll and "live for the Lord" ... he flies to Los Angeles the following day and is baptized a Seventh Day Adventist ... he will abide by his decision for five years before resuming his musical career...
and
1996, it is a musical chainsaw massacre at an environmental benefit concert in Jacksonville, Oregon, when Bonnie Raitt and band are drowned out by protesting loggers who rev chainsaws and light firecrackers to show their opposition to saving the redwoods...
Every now and then, your host idly wonders whether or not grammar would be meaningfully improved if people adopted the semanticist practice of dropping subscripts next to noun phrases to indicate whether or not different entities are being referred to.
Actually, the intended parse was the only one I could get: two coordinated indirect questions, one starting with 'what' and the other starting with 'who'. The 'who' question could by itself be a relative clause, but since no other relative clause to coordinate with it came before the 'and', I had to take it as an indirect question.
Posted by: Neal Whitman | October 07, 2004 at 11:34 AM
My intuitions on this are admittedly a bit shaky. The way I wrote it up was my immediate reaction, but after reading it again, I decided that the problem might be me as much as anything else. The "who" struck me on the first pass as referring to the "femme rocker", in a bracketing like:
what femme rocker's [[concert was the target of a chainsaw protest in the Northwest] and [who swore off rock 'n' roll after getting religion]]
But reading things at 1:30 in the morning probably isn't a recipe for sound judgments in this regard. ;)
Posted by: Semantic Compositions | October 07, 2004 at 02:33 PM