I saw an advert for a bank on a billboard today, it said something like “The only surprises you get with our account are nice ones.”
To my mind, why use 11 words when 8 will do? So I set about rewriting it and came up with “You only get nice surprises with our account.“ I was showing this to my mate Mark, and he instantly pointed out that I had changed the meaning, and of course I had… I put “only” in the wrong place, it should have modified “nice surprises” not the verb.
The correct version, then, is “You get only nice surprises with our account.“ Somehow, though, it doesn’t flow as nicely as my orginal one – at least to my ears. I suppose this might be because the adverb is modifying a noun rather than a verb, perhaps I have some preference selection in my head for adverb-verb modification, rather than adverb-noun.
Syntactically, the original advert is interesting in other ways too: the verb get has the direct object and subject in front of it. This kind of construction is known as a pseudo-cleft construction. I think I fell asleep when we discussed that at university, so won’t explain it anymore than saying what it is.
So why did they go for a more complicated phrase structure, when a simpler one was available? It’s all down to topicalisation. English tends to put semantically important things at extremities, so first or last. This phrase has both: “Surprises” and its pronoun “ones”. The upshot is a sentence that emphasises the parts they want you to remember: “only surprises” – “nice surprises”.
