1. This writer allowed both `lurking' and `lies' to operate as verbials in his `sentence':

Lurking behind the recent demand for public apology for ancestral racism lies the hoary legend of the noble savage. (This is a defective sentence.)

Is the hoary legend lurking or lying? It cannot be doing both. This writer's attempt to claim that it can results in the loss to this sentence of a basic sentence, and therefore, of a sense. He should have written the sentence thus:

The hoary legend of the noble savage lies (or lurks) behind the recent demand for public apology for ancestral racism.

2. This writer is undecided about which of three possibilities is the verbial functor in his complex sentence. The result is a miscarriage of meaning:

Viewers have besieged the ABC switchboard since he went off air last May, taking leave to care for a sick family member. (This is a defective sentence.)

His present-participle phrase, `taking leave to care for a sick family member', does what present-participle phrases do: it attaches to the verb `have besieged' of the basic sentence as the simultaneous act of the subject `Viewers'. In so doing, it made the unintended meaning that `Viewers' were both `besieging' and `taking leave'. He should have constrained his rogue verbials into an adverb-led sentence that conjoins the two sentences `viewers have besieged the ABC switchboard' and `he went off air last May':

Viewers have besieged the ABC switchboard since he went off air last May to take leave to care for a sick member.

3. This writer allowed two verbial functors, a copula and a copular verb, to be active in his sentence. The inevitable result was an illogical proposition:

Leadership in the universities can no longer be a reward for excellence in scholarship to be handed out to people who are benign amateurs in financial management. (This is a defective sentence.)

He wanted to say two things:

Leadership in universities cannot be handed out to people who are benign amateurs in financial management

and

Leadership in universities can no longer be a reward for excellence in scholarship.

But he scotched his ability to say either. His copula phrase `can no longer be’ assigns the definition `a reward for excellence in scholarship’ to the noun-phrase subject `Leadership in universities’. Any phrase that attaches to a definition (by nature a noun phrase) cannot but function as an adjective. The phrase that attaches to this definition is `to be handed out to people who are benign amateurs in financial management’. This has two unfortunate and unintended results:

(i) The phrase `to be handed out to people who are benign amateurs in financial management’ becomes the adjective phrase that describes `a reward for excellence in scholarship’.

(ii) It fatuously denies the inherent logic of `a reward for excellence in scholarship’. (A reward for excellence in scholarship is necessarily a reward for excellence in scholarship. It is not at the same time `a reward to be handed out to amateurs'.)

In any case, this writer did not mean to talk about the handing out of `reward'. He meant to talk about the handing out of `leadership'. That is the subject his sentence raised. No doubt he thought he had succeeded to say something about the handing out of `leadership’: He was misled by the verb-like appearance of `to be handed out’ into thinking that it can engage the subject `Leadership in the universities’ as a verbial does. But `to be handed out’ is not a verb in his sentence. Its verbial is the copula phrase `can no longer be’. It engages the subject. The phrase `to be handed out’ can do no more than perform as part of an adjective phrase, albeit one that made this writer say something he did not mean to say. His sentence can be reconstructed to become a valid complex sentence. Its ambiguity is eliminated once its basic sentence is soundly constructed to contain only one verbial:

Leadership in universities can no longer be handed out to benign amateurs in financial management as a reward for excellence in scholarship. (copular-verb basic sentence)