interestingly ungrammatical sentence
I unconsciously copyedit books as I read them, and I'm often dismayed at the shoddy punctuation, style, and grammar in many otherwise fine books. But today is the first time in a long time that I've run into a sentence that seemed ungrammatical in a way that wasn't instantly obvious; I had to stop and think to figure out exactly what the error was. (I'm sure anyone who does linguistics for a living could figure it out immediately, but I'm rusty enough that it took me a minute.)
The sentence is in the prologue of Fordlandia, a book about Henry Ford's attempt to build a rubber plantation-cum-Pleasantville in the depths of the Amazon jungle. Describing a set of twisted railroad tracks left in the ruins of Fordlandia, the author writes:
[...] it's bewildering to think what force of nature or how the passing of time could have produced their current mangled state.
When I read this, it seemed like the sentence contained an error in parallelism, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. The intended structure seems to be:
It's bewildering to think [[what force of nature] or [how the passing of time] could have produced X].
which looks reasonable at first glance; placing what force of nature and how the passing of time in parallel makes sense on the surface, since they both introduce relative clauses with the same verb phrase:
It's bewildering to think [what force of nature could have produced X] or [how the passing of time could have produced X].
After thinking about it a little longer, though, I'm convinced it really is wrong. Can you figure out the error?
In [what force of nature] could have produced X, the phrase what force of nature acts as the subject of could have produced. But [how the passing of time] could have produced X is actually the wrong structure; it should be how [[the passing of time] could have produced X]. So you can't cut away how the passing of time from its verb phrase in the same way you can cut away what force of nature.
A more correct parallel phrasing would be:
It's bewildering to think how the forces of nature or the passing of time could have produced X.
The sentence is in the prologue of Fordlandia, a book about Henry Ford's attempt to build a rubber plantation-cum-Pleasantville in the depths of the Amazon jungle. Describing a set of twisted railroad tracks left in the ruins of Fordlandia, the author writes:
[...] it's bewildering to think what force of nature or how the passing of time could have produced their current mangled state.
When I read this, it seemed like the sentence contained an error in parallelism, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. The intended structure seems to be:
It's bewildering to think [[what force of nature] or [how the passing of time] could have produced X].
which looks reasonable at first glance; placing what force of nature and how the passing of time in parallel makes sense on the surface, since they both introduce relative clauses with the same verb phrase:
It's bewildering to think [what force of nature could have produced X] or [how the passing of time could have produced X].
After thinking about it a little longer, though, I'm convinced it really is wrong. Can you figure out the error?
In [what force of nature] could have produced X, the phrase what force of nature acts as the subject of could have produced. But [how the passing of time] could have produced X is actually the wrong structure; it should be how [[the passing of time] could have produced X]. So you can't cut away how the passing of time from its verb phrase in the same way you can cut away what force of nature.
A more correct parallel phrasing would be:
It's bewildering to think how the forces of nature or the passing of time could have produced X.