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The following is a sentence from an analysis by Sarah Dillon of a passage of Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love.

The fact that the tree’s a chestnut then promises in its symbolism the potential reinvigoration of a marriage that we then find gestured towards in the rest of the passage.

I can't understand how the relative clause "that we then find gestured towards in the rest of the passage" works. It seems that the clause modifies "the potential reinvigoration of a marriage". Is it the object of "find"? Or is it the object of "towards"?

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    Can't it be the object of both of them? Is "plum pits" the object of "found" or "thown out" in the sentence "I found the plum pits thown out by William"? Similarly, "We find the potential reinvigoration of a marriage gestured towards in the rest of the passage."
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Aug 19, 2015 at 14:53
  • @PeterShor: Though "throw out" is a prepositional verb, "gesture towards" is not. "gesture" needs another object. For example, "The couple is gestured towards the potential reinvigoration of a marriage". But, does this fit into the original sentence?
    – Aki
    Commented Aug 19, 2015 at 15:57
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    The writer of that sentence is using "gestured towards" with only one object, whether or not this is approved of by dictionaries and pedants. Rearranging the order of the sentence, this gives "We find that the rest of the passage gestures towards the potential reinvigoration of a marriage." (And the Merriam-Webster dictionary, at least, is perfectly happy with this usage.)
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Aug 19, 2015 at 16:08

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(Good heavens, what a sentence.)

Here's a modified version:

The choice of a chestnut tree thus symbolizes a potential reinvigoration of the marriage that we later find gestured towards.

Which means that a potential reinvigoration gets hinted at, or gestured towards, later in the passage.

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