The absence of one little word complete reverses the meaning

When I saw this headline today in the Daily Mail:

Leona Lewis paid £1m to sing at phone billionaire daughter’s 21st birthday party

I thought Leona Lewis had paid someone for the privilege of singing at Libby Caudwell’s birthday party.  It caught my eye because that’s an unusual way to go about things.

Clearly, that wasn’t the intended meaning of the headline, but it was only until I got to the verb to sing that I realised that I wasn’t reading it right – or rather, the editor hadn’t written it correctly.

The verb pay can be a ditransitive verb (takes two objects) as in to pay £1m to John, so I was happy to understand it this way until the word to but then the verb sing interrupted that thinking.  Up until sing the sentence fits the normal ditransitive reading for the active voice for the verb pay.

What the writer intended was that the verb paid was actually to be understood in the passive voice. In the passive voice the order of a verb’s arguments (subject, direct object, indirect object) can be shifted around in order to give focus to one particular entity.  Most commonly, the direct object becomes the subject and the original subject becomes optional – as in “The elephant ate an apple.” vs “An apple was eaten (by the elephant).”

What the headline needs is a was to make it passive – that’s all it needs, without it, it’s a garden path.  At least they got the apostrophe in the right place – small mercies.