Lectional ambiguity

You don't recognise this term ? No wonder. It's one I claim to have invented, a few years ago, to describe a problem sometimes encountered by readers, due not to poor eyesight or illiteracy or mere stupidity, but inherent in the text before their eyes. It is possible for English sentences (and for all I know, sentences in other languages too) to harbour little ambiguities that cause the reader to stumble.

I have just met one in the fascinating and entertaining autobiography of the late Patrick Campbell, My Life and Easy Times. One of his sentences, at the beginning of a paragraph, reads "Some weeks before I'd been put into the day-room of the sanatorium with an all-time record of thirteen boils, most of them on my back, to wait for the doctor to come and attack them." My brain registered the sequence 'Some weeks before I'd been put into the day-room . . . ' as the start of a self-contained clause, and I read on only to find there was no main verb: it felt rather like cycling round a corner and into a brick wall.

The alternative (and correct) reading supplies a comma after the word before, so that 'Some weeks before' becomes a self-contained phrase telling the reader when the incident about to be described actually happened. This is obvious enough once you have this pointed out to you, or if by chance you interpret it right first time; but it is an uncomfortable cerebral experience for a reader if he/she gets it wrong.*

The author or editor or typesetter would have done the reader a favour by inserting the missing comma after the word 'before'.

It is, I suggest, one of the courtesies of an author to his/her public, to spot lectional ambiguities in her/his own work, and to find ways of steering readers through her/his (or 'his/her' if you prefer it) sentences without mishap.

Now this word 'lectional'. It doesn't appear in my smart new two-volume edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, but I wanted a word that meant 'in the matter or process of reading', so I invented it. The word 'lection' means 'reading', so I reckon that 'lectional' is a very good word. Editors of the Oxford Dictionaries, please note, and credit me with the coinage.

* The interpretation of the sentence could be said to hinge on whether the word 'before' is to be read as an adverb or a conjunction.

Lectional Ambiguity