I think I can qualify as a native speaker even though my mother tongue is
German....I have been almost exclusively an English speaker for 64 years now.
I had to back up and reread it, so, yes, I agree that there is a problem. The
syntax is awkward. The ‘concerns and complaints policy’ is not isolated enough
to be immediately recognized as a unit. In speech, this might have been
mitigated by tone and emphasis, but in writing it has to be made explicit by
either syntax or punctuation.
Ursula
I had to back up and read it again
On Jan 27, 2018, at 6:05 PM, Torgeir Fjeld <t.fjeld1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear listers,
....
However one might feel about all this, there is one puzzle (to a
second language user, that is) that remains after reading The
Telegraph's expose, and it is this: the medium writes the following
(quoting a school official):
"The school has a clear and fair concerns and complaints policy and we
encourage this to be used as needed. It would be wrong for us to
comment on individual cases."
Can this be right? "[It] has a clear and fair concerns..." Uargh! It
reads oddly, no?
Natives, what do you say? Is this an individual case that may rightly
be commented upon?
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld, PhD
http://torgeirfjeld.com/
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