Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <meaning>
Title: What is the meaning of "of trouble" in the following sentence?
Question: What is the meaning of "of trouble" in the following sentence:   Reports are now coming in  of trouble  at yet another jail.   Does it mean "Reports(=trouble at yet another jail) are now received" ?  What is the difference between without "of":   Reports are now coming in trouble at yet another jail.    and with "of":   Reports are now coming in  of  trouble at yet another jail.

Answers:
sents: text: Consider the sentence in two parts: 1.
text: Reports are now coming in.
text: 2.
text: There is trouble at yet another jail.
text: Or look at it in a conversation:
text: "We're now getting a lot of reports.
text: " "Oh, really?
text: What do they say?
text: " "There's trouble at yet another jail.
text: "
text: In the sentence, of is used to indicate the reports' subject matter.
text: Several different words could be used to express the same thing: Reports are now coming in of trouble at yet another jail.
text: Reports are now coming in about trouble at yet another jail.
text: Reports are now coming in concerning trouble at yet another jail.
text: Reports are now coming in in relation to trouble at yet another jail.
text: Reports are now coming in on the topic of trouble at yet another jail.
text: Reports are now coming in that say there is trouble at yet another jail.
text: Syntactically, reports are not the same thing as trouble .
text: It's like a bowl of ice cream .
text: The bowl contains ice cream, but the bowl isn't the ice cream.
text: You can't just remove of (without replacing it with something else) and have the phrase make sense.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/73781/Jason Bassford
score: 25
sents: text: The role of "of" is clearer if you move "are now coming in" to the end of the sentence: Reports of trouble at yet another jail are now coming in.
text: Or, reduce the sentence to: Reports of trouble are coming in.
text: We have reports of trouble.
text: "Of" says what the reports are about.
text: You can't remove it.
text: Compare "reports of trouble" with "pictures of boats", "sales of houses", etc.
text: Without "of", "Reports trouble are coming in" doesn't work.
text: (You could say: "Trouble reports are coming in", although that wouldn't work with the longer description "trouble at yet another jail".)
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/4491/Boann
score: 9
sents: text: I cannot parse this without "of", as the noun phrase "trouble at yet another jail" has nothing to give it a grammatical role in the sentence.
text: With "of", this indicates the particular meaning of the noun report which takes a complement with "of": a message that something has occurred or been witnessed, without necessarily having any more detail.
text: This is distinct from the meaning of report when followed by "about" or "concerning", which usually implies a degree of detail.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/1780/Colin Fine
score: 7
sents: text: No answers that define what "Reports are now coming in trouble at yet another jail" means: I get the sense that we have some naughty reports that are assaulting more jails or the reports
text: are not having much success at attacking jails.
text: (The jails are fighting back?)
text: This shift is by taking "in trouble" from the "coming in" verb phrase.
text: Since "at" appears after "in trouble", you get the new "coming at" verb phrase, which basically means fighting or brawling.
text: The "In trouble" can either mean one has been caught and will be punished or some issue has come up and failure is becoming more likely.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/88984/IMarvinTPA
score: 1
sents: text: Reports are now coming in of trouble at yet another jail.
text: The standard order here would be: Reports of trouble at yet another jail are now coming in.
text: In newspeak, reports of trouble, reports of rioting, reports of [whatever] are common usages.
text: at yet another
text: just means: there is
text: has already been reports of trouble at one jail.
text: This is the second.
text: Yet another child almost drowned at the lake.
text: [there was already one]
text: This sounds like a reporter speaking live, and that sometimes causes unusual word order.
text: But it is not wrong for speech.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/33113/Lambie
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
In the sentence,  of  is used to indicate the reports' subject matter. Without "of", "Reports trouble are coming in" doesn't work. The standard order here would be:  Reports of trouble  at yet another jail are now coming in.   In newspeak, reports of trouble, reports of rioting, reports of [whatever] are common usages.  
The sentence doesn’t make any sense without "of" since "of" explains what the reports are about.