Our university, in expelling a student who verbally harassed his roommate, has erred by penalizing the student for doing what he surely has a right to do: speak his mind.
Q1) Are the word "student"s in the sentence the same student?
Q2) I am having problem understanding the sentence.
Does the sentence mean the student verbally harassed his roommate, but it is still not right to penalize the student because he has right to speak his mind? Or does it mean that the student was expelled, but it turned out that he actually did not verbally harass others, but just spoke his mind?
Answer
The answer to question 1 is yes, and the answer to question 2 is that your first interpretation is perfectly correct: the student has done something bad in verbally harassing his roommate, but it is the opinion of the speaker that the university has nonetheless erred in expelling the harasser for doing so.
More specifically, for question 1, the definite article on "the student" in the second clause, coupled with the fact that the student has been introduced for the first time in the previous part of the sentence (with the indefinite article "a"), makes it certain that they are one and the same.
For question 2, in order to make your second interpretation correct, the sentence would have to be written like this instead:
Our university, in expelling a student who allegedly verbally harassed his roommate, has erred in their assessment that his speech constituted harassment: he was just speaking his mind.
The biggest clue to me that the speaker means your first interpretation and not your second is that the first clause of your sentence presents "verbally harassed his roommate" as a fact.
No comments:
Post a Comment