jabhatta2It might be better to condense some of these ideas down into one post, since the threads you're pulling on with me and Marty are very similar. Also, I think much of the trouble stems from the fact that ULTIMATELY creates confusion no matter where we place it in the sentence. The meaning clearly expressed in E is that reducing the number of people who express dissatisfaction is the ultimate goal of the commission. That is, this is the goal that they want to achieve at the end of a series of efforts. Keep in mind that this is the meaning of “ultimate” that is retained in “ultimately.” We’re describing something that happened, or will happen, at the end of a sequence of events.
We could certainly express this idea with “ultimately” if the second half were a separate clause:
The tourism commission has conducted surveys of hotels in the most popular resorts; ultimately, the commission’s goal is to reduce the number of guests who express overall dissatisfaction with the hotels’ service.However, when we add “ultimately” to the modifier, we end up with trouble. The exact position of the word matters, and it creates a weird meaning wherever we put it in this phrase!
ultimately with the goal to reduceIt sounds like they only have the goal at the end. They weren’t with the goal initially, but later on they are with the goal. This doesn’t make sense. For the same reason, your option C about the gun doesn’t work. (By the way, I hope John is okay.)
with ultimately the goal to reduce This just isn’t a coherent English word order. If we want “ultimately” to apply to “with,” we should place it before for clarity. It can’t apply to a noun (“the goal”).
with the goal ultimately to reduce / with the goal to ultimately reduceI’ll consider these together. Since an adverb can’t apply to “the goal,” both of these must be using “ultimately” to modify the infinitive verb “to reduce.” This is a valid place to put an adverb, but it’s not how we typically use “ultimately.” I might say “I want to finally increase my running speed” if I had tried before and hoped to hit the accomplishment now. But “ultimately” doesn’t work the same way. If we used it here, it would sound as if we ONLY wanted the result later, as the result of a series of steps, and would not be happy to have it now. That’s not something we typically say. (This cuts option B about the gun.)
with the goal to reduce ultimatelyWe don’t normally place adverbs directly after the verb like this. We can say “I want to gradually lose weight,” not “I want to lose gradually weight.”
One additional source of confusion here is that ULTIMATE has a wider range of meanings than ULTIMATELY. Often, we use “ultimate” to talk about something that is the most, best, or furthest extreme available. “This roller coaster is the ultimate thrill ride.” That’s not a meaning that really works in adverb form, but there are shades of that meaning when we misplace ULTIMATELY. So when you say “ultimately kill John,” it sounds like an extreme action. Perhaps John is a vampire or demon lord, and he is being killed once and for all this time. Similarly, when you say “ultimately reduce,” there are shades of grinding that number into dust. This may not be a standard dictionary usage of “ultimately,” but since these placements aren’t standard to begin with, that’s what comes to mind for me. I can’t speak for Marty, but perhaps he is experiencing the same thing.