Grammar question: What have I done to screw up this sentence?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t know if it’s dangling a participle or what, but I have been known to write a sentence that can be confusing to read.

In fact, it was really brought to my attention when I titled a Pit thread “I know there’s a movie about The Cat and the Hat coming out!” which was about all the damn marketing hype tied to this movie.

Subsequent replies made me realize that the subject could have been read as a movie about The Cat and the Hat coming out of the closet. :smack:

Now, I know I could have fixed the clarity of the sentence by writing “I know there’s a movie coming out about The Cat and The Hat!” but what was my exact error? I have caught myself writing similar sentences and fixed them, but I’d like to know what I’m doing wrong.

2

Failure to use quotation marks – try –

I know there’s a “Cat and the Hat” movie coming out!"

(it should be “Cat in the Hat,” btw.)

3

Shoot. I knew Gaudere’s Law would come back to bite me in the ass. :smack:

4

It’s called a “misplaced modifier”. You have “coming out” in a place that modifies the noun phrase “Cat in the Hat”, as opposed to “movie”. You could rephrase it as “I know there’s a Cat in the Hat movie coming out”, if you wanted.

Related to this is the “dangling modifier” – “Stretching out to wake up in the hammock, the sun shone brightly on Jim.” This sentence reads as though the sun had been sleeping in the hammock, not Jim.

5

Yes, I’ve seen those (once on a press release from my employer, and when I pointed it out to TPTB, it was dismissed :rolleyes: ) so I’m doing the same thing, just on the end of the sentence.

6

I would have written “I know that there’s a movie about ‘The Cat and the Hat’ coming out!”

“That” serves to emphasize that you’re talking about the fact of the movie coming out.

7

Your “that” is totally unnecessary and doesn’t accomplish your stated purpose, and if your sentence were submitted to me for proofing/editing your “that” would be stricken.

8

As has been pointed out, there is a syntactic ambiguity in the portion of the sentence following “there’s”. It is not, however, a “misplaced modifier”. In this sentence, “coming out” is not a modifier, and it is certainly not misplaced. It is a gerund verb phrase in its canonical location, right after its subject.

Your intended reading might be bracketed like this:

[a movie about The Cat in the Hat] [coming out]

Here, there is a noun phrase “a movie about The Cat in the Hat”, consisting of a smaller noun phrase “a movie” and a prepositional phrase “about The Cat in the Hat”. This whole noun phrase serves as the subject of the gerund verb phrase “coming out”. Everything comes together to form one big gerund verb phrase, complete with subject.

The unintended reading that you noticed might be bracketed like this:

[a movie] [about The Cat in the Hat coming out]

Here, there is a noun phrase “a movie” followed by a prepositional phrase. The object of the preposition is the gerund verb phrase “The Cat in the Hat coming out”. Everything comes together to form one big noun phrase.

A number of facts about English conspire to create this ambiguity between the two readings. Off the top of my head:

-the “there is” existential construction can take as its object either a noun phrase or a subject + gerund verb phrase
-a prepositional phrase follows rather than precedes the noun phrase it modifies
-a preposition can take as its object either a noun phrase or a subject + gerund verb phrase
-a subject precedes rather than follows its verb

If any one of these parameters were different, as some (maybe all) are in various other languages, the ambiguity would be gone.

But just because a sentence is ambiguous doesn’t mean it has an “error”. In this case, following the standard rules of English syntax happened to result in an ambiguity. This happens all the time, we just don’t notice it because we’re good at using contextual and even statistical clues to disambiguate, without even being aware of it.

Stylistically, on the other hand, it is a good idea to avoid ambiguity, and I think your rephrasing, “a movie coming out about The Cat in the Hat”, with its postponed prepositional phrase, is a good way of clearing up the meaning.

9

Or perhaps you could change your words a bit. Change the phrase “coming out” to released. I know the movie, The Can In the Hat will be released soon.

10

Or perhaps The Cat in the Hat.

11

And “about The Cat in the Hat” is restrictive, so setting it off with commas wouldn’t be proper. Correct?