Quote:
Originally Posted by David Atkatz
It is, without a doubt, "problems are prevalent." In his sentence, prevalent describes the problems, not the infighting.
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I disagree and see no reason, syntactically, why that is so. It would surely be clearer to use a definite article to refer to infighting if that were indeed what were prevalent, but it is not necessary. You can say that your interpretation is true "without doubt," but it is interpretation only and therefore open to credible doubt. In fact, the vast majority of defining relative clauses modify by proximity, which means that in a case of ambiguity, we could fall back on the interpretation that the relative pronoun "that" is modifying the noun in closest proximity, which in this case is the aforementioned "infighting." However, you are using larger contextual clues to interpret that it is modifying the earlier-occurring "problems." That's a fair interpretation, but it is far from being "without doubt," and I revel in the fact that very few things dealing with language are such.