How would you interpret this sentence?

From the BBC News web site:

"Dr Dean offered his condolences to the families of the murdered women, who were not at the hearing."

I'm curious - this must be incorrect?

Hi GG

I agree. That's the trouble with English, one often has to resort to logic and common sense because the language is somewhat inexact. Fortunately speakers of English are willing to do so.

Cheers
CB

Clive wrote:

In Finnish, does one never have to resort to logic or common sense?

Hi Clive

I am pleasantly surprised that you should take an interest in my native language. I am not an expert in Finnish but common sense tells me there must be such cases. I think ambiguity would most likely arise from a word having more than one meaning, probably not from grammatical forms because there is such a lot of them. I have given some examples of Finnish inflections in Post:244182.

J Lewis gives a good example of having to resort to common sense when reading English in Post:298529. I'll rewrite his sentences here:

He ate a lot of oranges, which came from Sicily.
- The oranges he ate came from Sicily.

He ate a lot of oranges, which annoyed me.
- Common sense tells me the oranges didn't annoy me but the fact that he ate them. There is no other way of knowing what the sentence means, one just has to use common sense. If the oranges had annoyed me, the sentence would remain unchanged. You could of course repeat the antecedent and say:
He ate a lot of oranges, which oranges annoyed me.

Problems like this are unknown in Finnish because a different pronoun or at least a different form of a pronoun has to be used in each case. If oranges is in the singular (orange), the relative pronoun is also in the singular. Which has only one form. I don't even know how many forms the corresponding Finnish pronoun has.

Anyone who would like to have a brief introduction to the Finnish language in English is advised to go to
[link]

Cheers
CB