A news article led with the following two sentences. I include the first sentence only for context, and my question concerns the last sentence.
Upon reading it I was at first confused, thinking, "How can you shoot someone with a knife." Is that just me? Is this sentence badly written? If so, is there a term for this sort of error? And would you call it a "grammatical" error or something else?
Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was thinking of leaving his country, complaining that in today's Holland it was no longer possible to freely express one's opinion about religious matters. Sadly, he was proved right last week when a man with dual Moroccan-Dutch citizenship repeatedly shot and then almost decapitated Mr. van Gogh with a knife.
How about: I shot ducks with Mr Doe and later drank whiskies with him. Doesn't seem like an error to me, but one could rewrite the sentence to: "a man ... repeatedly shot him with a gun and then almost decapitated [him] with a knife."
I think the term you want is "poor writing". The sentence is ambiguous at first sight, but is, I think, grammatically correct. It's another example of the "Eats shoots and leaves" syndrome.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think it's actually ungrammatical. It's a blend of constructions. A pair such as 'shot and stabbed' can arise in one of two ways. Taking the basic sentence as S V O ('a man shot van Gogh' and 'a man stabbed van Gogh'), the V can be replaced by a conjunct V[V and V], giving 'a man shot and stabbed van Gogh'. In this case 'shot and stabbed' is at one level a single verb, and this single verb has one subject, one object, and if you use an adverbial modifier 'with a knife', that applies to the whole compound verb too.
The other way to get a conjunct verb is 'right node raising', which means having two full clauses with a final (semantic) element in common, and eliminating the first duplicate. The second copy is 'raised' from object of its own clause to object of both clauses. So 'the man waited patiently for van Gogh then surreptitously decapitated him' can undergo right node raising to become 'the man waited patiently for[,] then surreptitiously decapitated van Gogh'. Depending on how long the first clause is, there might be a definite pause and intonation change '[,]' signalling the omission of the object.
The thing about this is that it has to operate on the rightmost node. It's an intonational or grouping thing. You could say 'the man waited for, then stabbed with a knife, the director van Gogh'. But it won't work if you try to raise something that isn't final. At least, this example here doesn't work for me.
I've chosen example sentences where the two ways of getting verb conjunctions are clearly differentiated. In real examples it sometimes won't be clear whether it's a conjoint verb, or a conjoint verb phrase in which the right node has been raised.
The right node doesn't have to be the object. Compare:
The man cut up his sandwich, then stabbed van Gogh with a knife. The man cut up his sandwich, then stabbed van Gogh, with a knife. ['with a knife' is raised adverbial also modifying 'cut up his sandwich']
Write an amphibological phrase On a page that you'll read in two ways. Its words may be clear, But the grammar, I fear, Leaves the meaning quite hard to appraise.
It surely seems grammatically incorrect to me.