Going through some 'odds-and-sods' files on my computer today, I found this snippet saved from a BBC News story in May 2002. As the first line clearly reveals, the article concerns a robbery at London's Heathrow Airport:
Scotland Yard officers have arrested a gang suspected of carrying out a £2m raid at Heathrow Airport.
The story is fairly unremarkable, certainly linguistically, except for the following sentence:
The standard reading of this sentence is nonsensical (to me at least), since it implies that the cash was already stolen before it arrived at Heathrow on an SAA flight (perhaps in South Africa, possibly on the flight itself). But if that was the case, then there was no raid at Heathrow, merely a collection.(i) The stolen cash arrived at Heathrow on an SAA flight.
What is meant, of course, is given by a non-reduced version:
(ii) The cash that was stolen had arrived at Heathrow on an SAA flight.My intuition is that the deviance of (i) is due to something stronger than Gricean implicature: that the participle stolen is temporally bound to the Event Time of the matrix verb arrived in such a way that, in order for the sentence to be true, the theft must have been complete before the arrival of the aircraft. (Once stolen and arrived are no longer clause-mates, the dependency disappears, in (ii).)
A similar queasiness attaches to "the former East Germany, the former captain of England" (though not a former captain) in sentences such as (iii); (iv) seems ok, where the expression is more deeply embedded:
(iii) She still lives in the former East Germany.
(iv) Inhabitants of larger towns in the former East Germany are experiencing spiralling energy costs.For me, (iii) is impossible (outside of the protagonists in the movie Goodbye Lenin). But perhaps I'm the only one? Or, more likely, this has been treated well elsewhere. Either way, your comments are welcome)
