Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Ideas aside, idiomatically speaking, both versions seem clumsy to me.  I
have rewritten the sentence in another message in this thread.

On 02 May 2009, Skitt wrote

Personal choice thing, but I really dislike reverse-sentence
structures for reporting.

The news here is the reported shooting rather than the report
itself, so that belongs up front;  how about:

"A man wearing an Iraqi military uniform is reported as shooting
dead two US soldiers and injuring three others in the city of
Mosul."

Comma?

I would have written: "Shots from a man wearing an Iraqi military
uniform killed two US soldiers and wounded* three others** in
Mosul."

* Shades of another thread.

** Or "wounded three bystanders", whichever is correct.

The earlier tradition was that gunshot wounds were called
wounds, and the word injury was reserved for damage
done accidentally as in car crashes etc.  The distinction seems
still valuable.

Actually, there are several rules (*real*, self-enforcing grammatical
rules, that is, rather than old-wives' shibboleths about not splitting
infinitives after Labor Day).

One of them is a procedure called "Heavy NP Shift" that sees to it
that long complex Noun Phrases (normally direct objects) wind up at
the end of the clause, where they're easier to process.  This is an
optional rule for several constructions (phrasal verbs like 'look the
book up', dative constructions like 'give  the phone to me', etc.)
that might otherwise put some constituent after the DO.  But the
optionality declines as the heaviness of the DO increases:

   Give the book to me.    ('Look the book up' works similarly)
   Give the big book to me.
   Give that large book on the table to me.
 ?Give that large book on the table that Bill got for you to me.
?*Give that large book on the table with the rip on the back and the
coffee
    stain on the front that Bill got for your birthday and then
forgot about
    to me.

Since English is a right-branching language, the end of the clause is
where large complex constituents are most easily parsed, and we have a
lot of rules that act to convert center-embedded structures into right-
branching ones.  If you don't do that you get a very awkward sentence.

In this particular case, a rather different construction is involved,
one of a family that all have the structure Subj-Verb-DO-Adj, for
instance:

   He shot them dead.     He buried them alive.
   He saw them dead.      He found them alive.

These are not all the same construction.  To shoot someone dead is to
shoot them with the result that they die, while to bury someone alive
is to bury them while they are alive (which results in death, too).
And one can't just swap the DO and Adj components ad lib.  However,
Heavy NP shift is applicable here, and when the DO is heavy enough
(and in this case, when both parts of "shoot dead" are equally
relevant to the report and work better when not separated, which is an
additional constraint), one can.  Apparently.

This particular construction type is called a "conspiracy" in the
trade, because it is essentially an example of parallel syntactic
evolution -- all the individual constructions these represent (Subj V
DO while DO is Adj, Subj V DO with result that DO is Adj, etc.)
"conspire" to exhibit the same preferred structure on the surface.
This conspiracy was studied back in the 1970s by Georgia Green of the
University of Illinois, though I don't have a reference handy.

Remember, you asked.

-John Lawler - http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue
   "Academic integrity still plagues campus"
Headline, University of Michigan Daily 11/12/02