Uh, no, poor grammar or words or phrases used improperly can genuinely have cascade / domino effects. Brush up on "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" if you wish to counter-balance your math-centric logic notions with how similar principles apply in written language. English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics.
> English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics.
I am aware of two theories in linguistics about the complexity of languages:
1. All human languages are equally complex, presumably for some fundamental reason.
2. Some languages are more complex than others. Specifically, languages with a long history of being spoken only within isolated communities are more complex, and languages that have had a wave of non-native adults learn to speak them get simplified as that happens.
English is one of the go-to examples for simplicity in languages that have been learned by many adults; the others I'm aware of are Swahili (the trade language for north/east Africa), Mandarin Chinese (the cross-regional language for China), and (in reverse) Latin (the cross-regional language for western Europe -- a lot of grammatical features of Latin get lost as the Romance languages develop from it; you might wonder why Greek still has noun cases when the romance languages lost them).
I'm not aware of any theory that would suggest English is more tricky than other langauges.
I don't have an example from a published academic paper, but from the linked article:
> the odds are this will stoke real hostility for those who are already dubious about what has been termed 'bullying' and so on by people interested in reproducibility.
I'm pretty sure this was intended to be read as
[has been termed] ['bullying' and so on by people interested in reproducibility].
But it could also be read as
[has been termed 'bullying' and so on] [by people interested in reproducibility].
Ambiguous wording like this could easily be overlooked in review, especially if the misinterpretation agrees with what the reader was already expecting.
