When the deletions are major, they may require surgery before they meet
the Syntactic Condition. Subject NPs are deleted, main verbs disappear
without trace, transitive verbs are left without objects. The copy editor then
has two options: transplant the surviving structure into another sentence or,
less probably, rebuild the original sentence until it is a well-formed structure
again. Contrary to popular belief, broadcast news very rarely contains
ungrammatical sentences. In a transplant, the recipient sentence normally
remains almost untouched, with only a preposition or conjunction inserted
under which the new structure can be embedded. The donor sentence,
however, often undergoes quite radical changes to fit it easily into the
recipient structure: