Risky Ambiguity

Good writers take good risks from time to time, and when they prevail, they can enrich a sentence with ambiguity without impairing the truth. In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education,” Jennifer Frey writes this interesting sentence: Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. A close reading of this example will remind us of a few important points, both grammatical and rhetorical.

Let’s focus on focused. That’s where the writer took a risk and her composition took an interesting grammatical turn. First let’s establish the fact that the sentence, for all its thirty-three words, is structurally simple; there is only one clause and it is grammatically independent: I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. The two structural groups which precede it (beginning over the past and focused on studying) are both phrases, and therefore are both subordinate elements (though not clauses) intended to build anticipation of some complete thought as the sentence concludes. The layout designs a standard cumulative sentence (main clause followed by subordinate detail) in reverse.

The word focused, once again, marks the beginning of the second structural phrase. It is grammatically the past participle of the transitive verb to focus, and as a participle (and here we are about to reach the heart of the issue) it functions as an adjective. Participles are adjectives built from verbs, and so like all adjectives they incline to modify some noun (or anything acting as a noun) close by. They may modify a noun by describing it more fully or by defining it more exactly, but whichever they do, they must do it logically. If I say, for example, that flying at night the lights of the city sparkle on the horizon, the participle flying grammatically modifies the noun lights. Logically, of course, that makes no sense, because what is flying is not the lights of the city, but the subject in the airplane, whose pronoun has been illicitly suppressed: when I fly at night, the lights of the city seem to sparkle in the distance. That’s better.

That is a mistake the author of our example, however, does not make. And not making it, she enlivens the sentence with a dash of ambiguity—not equivocity, but ambiguity. Something that is equivocal is misleading, and often purposefully so. Something that is ambiguous can be that, but it can also be something that allows for more than one interpretation, legitimately and logically so. When the writer here begins the second prepositional phrase with the participle focused, our instinct is to apply that participial adjective to the noun standing closest to it, the proper noun Honor’s College; and that makes logical sense as well, because such a college program may indeed (and it is true, in fact, in this case) have the studying of Western classics as its primary concern. But it could be that focused refers to the noun dean earlier in the sentence, again both grammatically and logically defensible and, in fact, all the likelier when we come to the main subject I (in the contraction I’ve) as we continue reading. Though inanimate colleges of people may be said figuratively to be focused, an animate pronoun magnetizes the participle all the more obviously, strengthening the assertion by associating it with a person’s mental determination.

The good ambiguity here lies, then, in the fact that the participle focused may modify either the nearby noun College or the faraway noun dean. Those two possibilities, equally justifiable, intensify the sentence by attributing a preeminent concern to two entities involved in the assertion—without causing confusion or raising any logical contradiction. And when that’s the case, composing such careful ambiguity does not impoverish but enriches the way language can carry meaning successfully from one mind to another.

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