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What is the term for the grammatical error where the same word is used to tie together two phrases, but in conflicting ways?

For example: "John has gone home and a hat" - "John has gone home" works, and "John has a hat" works, but the combination doesn't. "has" is doing double duty and failing at it.

Or: "The man walks in with a smug look, confident walk and talking animatedly". Again "The man walks in with a smug look" works, and so does "the man walks in talking animatedly", but combining the two with "and" feels awkward at the very least.

Helen Toomik
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    You're mixing up two meanings of has there, and it doesn't make sense. See this answer or this one. Either way, you're probably looking for zeugma or syllepsis. – Robusto Aug 25 '23 at 14:15
  • The result of syllepsis per @Robusto is a garden path sentence: You point us to the right, then you go left, and we go "Huh?" – Yosef Baskin Aug 25 '23 at 14:37
  • The second example uses false parallelism. 'He walks in with A, B and C' is required, where A, B and C are all noun phrases, or 'The man walks in with a smug look and a confident walk, the while talking animatedly.' – Edwin Ashworth Aug 25 '23 at 14:53
  • @Robusto — has the auxiliary verb in has gone has no semantic meaning, so I wouldn’t say that has has two different meanings here. – Tinfoil Hat Aug 25 '23 at 15:50
  • You can’t extract the man walks in talking animatedly from your sentence. You can extract **the man walks in with talking animatedly* (which is clearly incorrect). – Tinfoil Hat Aug 25 '23 at 15:51
  • @TinfoilHat No, because the first verb there is actually has gone, not has. A valid syllepsis there would be "The man has gone home and crazy." – Robusto Aug 25 '23 at 16:14
  • @Robusto — Yes, that’s why I'm saying the duplicate (Using verbs with multiple meanings) is not relevant to the structure offered by the OP — there’s no has/has at play. – Tinfoil Hat Aug 25 '23 at 19:17

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