From the “Sic!” section of World Wide Words #731 (5/9/11):
Aoife Bairead saw a headline in the Sunday Business Post of Ireland dated 3 April: “Bishops agree sex abuse rules”.
The crucial bit of syntax — “transitivizing P-drop” (see here) for ‘agree on/to’ — is widespread in British and Irish English, but it can result in risible ambiguities, specifically when what follows agree can be understood as an object clause, as it can here, thanks to the existence of both a noun rule (what was intended in the headline) and a verb rule and to the existence of both a transitive and an intransitive verb rule. All these factors combine to yield a possible, but unwanted, interpretation ‘agree that sex abuse rules’: a fine crash blossom (see here).
This is a subtle one. The headline (New Scientist, 2 May, p. 11):
Gene discovery
may be common
cause of autism
My first reading of the compound noun gene discovery is that discovery is an abstract noun, referring to an event (in which some gene, or possibly genes, is discovered, though in other cases N + discovery could refer to an event of discovered by N(s), as in a University of Chicago discovery; there are both “object” and “subject” readings of compounds with abstract nominal heads).
But it’s ridiculous to asset that an even of discovery is the cause of any condition. Something like “The discovery of genes at the University of Chicago may be a common cause of autism” is, at least at first, puzzling. (Ok, here’s a science-fiction scenario to write about.) Instead, N + discovery is intended to refer to the thing discovered about (in this case), or by (in other cases) N. This reading is available in the New Scientist headline, but it takes a little work to get to it.
You see the headline writer’s dilemma. The writer was given a very small space to produce a head, and the obvious “Recently/Newly discovered gene may be common cause of autism” won’t fit. “Newly found gene” might have fit, but give the headline writer a break.
The headlines roll on. Here’s another, from John Baker on ADS-L, 5/7/09, who found it in a mutual fund industry trade publication:
Asset Drops Fuel Expense Ratio Rise
Baker explained:
Its meaning? Decreases in the assets under management in mutual funds (mainly because of declining prices in the stock market) have caused the funds’ expense ratios to increase.
noting that the headline is so hard to parse because four of its six words (everything except asset and ratio) can function as either nouns or verbs.
