John –

 

I suspect that with that sentence – and with many, many others in English-language newspapers – your students are having trouble with “chunking” and interpretation partly because they will tend to approach idiomatic language literally. As a native English-speaker, I read “with an eye to” almost as a single element, and so “eye” in that expression doesn’t have the same list of alternate choices as “eye” used normally does.  One limitation of what we might call “plain vanilla RK” is that it has no device for indicating the status of idioms as idioms, although it isn’t difficult to tweak it to do so.

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University