(no subject)

[wellinghall]

"Council owed £460k in tax"

[Poll #1173104]

ETA: The answer
It turns out to be the latter; but the headline does seem to be rather unclear.

Comments

[emperor]

Depends on context - the statement could mean either.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

What emperor said.

[gayalondiel.livejournal.com]

IAWTC

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

As emperor said, it could be either; however, as far as I'm aware, councils don't pay tax, at least not in the same context that people do.

[brightlywoven.livejournal.com]

west army push bottles up germans

[vescoiya.livejournal.com]

You know that was my first logic exercise ever. Good old ambiguity.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Coming back now I have more time to clarify why I chose that way, since I was the first person to vote for the 2nd option.

Considered *purely* as a sentence, the first option seems closer grammatically, since the second needs an [is] to be understood before 'owed'. However, as whichever way it is read, it is most likely that a [the] also needs to be understood before 'council' to make a decent sentence, then the obvious conclusion is that the sentence is written in 'headline-ese', where auxiliary verbs and other 'unnecessary helpers' have been left out for the sake of minimal word usage.

Once the sentence is understood as headline-ese, then to understand it one applies not merely knowledge of grammar, but knowledge of people/writers/how the world works. The idea of a council *having* owed tax but no longer doing so is really not 'newsworthy' at all; it is the sort of thing that might appear among other things in the body of an article, but would not make a headline. The *current* situation of people *now* owing tax to the council, by contrast, is the sort of thing we do expect to see headlined in newspapers or journals. Thus the majority of your commenters, being people of sense and not perversely quibbling for the sake of it, were easily able to interpret the sentence 'rightly' ;-)