[Grammar] Sentence Analysis/Pronoun

[Soup]

Originally Posted by Yoast

I think that "it" must refer to the wrapper because the word "underneath" makes that the only viable solution.

That too, but not necessarily. What if the Golden Ticket were inside the wrapper but underneath the bar? That's possible too. From a syntactic point of view, however, there's only one possible reading: it refers to a noun phrase, not a prepositional phrase; moreover, there's this rule that a pronoun cannot "look inside" the object of a another phrase. So given the noun phrase the wrapper and its object, the prepositional phrase of a bar of chocolate, the pronoun it "sees" the head of the entire noun phrase (NP), the wrapper, and nothing else inside of that NP:

NP [the wrapper [ of a bar [of chocolate]]]

Originally Posted by Yoast

I still think there is something strange about the sentence.

There is indeed. (I wonder who will see it first. )

[svartnik]

I have found one :

The famous English scientist, Professor Foulbody, -- no set of commas; this is an example of restrictive apposition

[svartnik]

[Soup]

Originally Posted by svartnik

I have found one :

The famous English scientist, Professor Foulbody, -- no set of commas; this is an example of restrictive apposition

Yes. It's the commas that are awkward. For example, omit the commas, as shown below, and the resulting sentence has the pronoun it referring back to the noun machine:

The famous English scientist, Professor Foulbody, inventedamachine which would tell you at once, ... , whether or not there was a Golden Ticket hidden underneath it.

I'd re-write it as follows:

... a machine that could tell you at once whether a Golden ticket was hidden underneath the chocolate-bar wrapper.