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The book was boring, and as stupid as the last one, punctuated by silly mistakes.

Is it unambiguous? Is it grammatical?

I'm asking if it's grammatical because I want to know whether you can offset a participle phrase at the end of a sentence like that, as it does not immediately follow the main clause. Is it ambiguous as to whether both books have silly mistakes?

I can't post the actual sentence I'm thinking about, sorry.

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  • PP at the end of the clause?
    – BillJ
    Commented Aug 17, 2021 at 10:45
  • Structurally / syntactically, it's unquestionably "ambiguous". You've only got to compare the two different parsings if we replace ...punctuated by silly mistakes (which is semantically ambiguous) with 1) ...written before he signed a major publishing deal and 2) ...written purely to cash in on that earlier success. It should be obvious that the final clause in 1) refers to the previous book, but in 2) it refers to the current book. In short, the construction can only be interpreted using common sense, which in some cases might not be sufficient to disambiguate.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 17, 2021 at 10:57
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    right thanks @FumbleFingers that makes sense.
    – user438381
    Commented Aug 17, 2021 at 10:59
  • So what PP are you referring to?
    – BillJ
    Commented Aug 17, 2021 at 11:03
  • I thought "punctuated..." would be a prepositional phrase. is it not @BillJ ?
    – user438381
    Commented Aug 17, 2021 at 11:04

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