Is "proximity" a real grammatical rule?

(a)  "The daughter of the colonel who had a black dress left the party."

(b)  "The daughter of the colonel who had a black mustache left the party."

(c)  "The daughter of the colonel who had a black hat left the party."

(a), (b), and (c) are grammatical, but, while (a) and (b) are understandable, I have some difficulties in understanding (c); more precisely, in (c) it is unclear, at least to me, whether the hat is the colonel's hat or the daughter's hat.

I wonder if it exists a grammar rule to decipher (c).

I searched for grammatical proximity without any useful result.

Solution 1:

You can use commas to help:

(a) "The daughter of the colonel, who had a black dress, left the party."

(b) "The daughter of the colonel who had a black mustache left the party."

So, if I saw:

(c) "The daughter of the colonel who had a black hat left the party."

I'd assume the hat belonged to the colonel, while in this case:

(c) "The daughter of the colonel, who had a black hat, left the party."

I'd assume the hat belonged to the colonel's daughter.

That all said, it's still ambiguous, and could be interpreted either way. If you want to remove all ambiguity entirely:

(c) "The daughter of the colonel, who carried her black hat, left the party."

but you can't always make a change like that to fix the problem (particularly when you're dealing with the colonel's bratty son, for instance).

Solution 2:

Yes, proximity is a "rule", in the sense that the reader expects any pronoun to refer to the nearest preceding noun in grammatical and semantic agreement. If following that rule results in misunderstanding or ambiguity it's the writer's fault, not the reader's.

On the other hand, one rarely encounters such sentences as these in isolation. If it had been previously mentioned that there were multiple colonels present, of whom only one wore a black hat --or multiple daughters, of whom only one wore a black hat-- the ambiguity would be greatly diminished, and the writer's fault would be mitigated. (Note, however, that in either of these cases the commas would be out of place, since the relative clause would be restrictive.)

You are quite right to be puzzled.