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I am learning English and can't fully understand the sentence:

Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue successfully raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ.

The question is to what words relates "successfully"?
Should I understand the sentence as "(Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue successfully) raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ." or "Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue (successfully raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ)."

P.S. The sentence is from The Guardian article (caption of the first figure).

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    ((Freezing and rewarming) (sections of heart tissue)) successfully (raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ). In other words, one day maybe you can freeze your corpse and have it revived in the distant future.
    – Dan Bron
    Mar 14, 2017 at 12:27

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Grammatically, "successfully" could refer to "freezing and rewarming" or to "raises". In other words, they could be saying

(Freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissues) raises hopes (in a successful manner, i.e. the hopes are indeed raised as high as one would want) for doing the same for the entire organ

or

Successfully freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissues (i.e. the freezing and rewarming were successful, presumably because the heart tissues survived the process unharmed) (raises hopes for doing the same for the entire organ).

The latter makes a lot more sense so that is certainly what the author meant. So "successfully" refers to "freezing and rewarming (sections of heart tissue)".

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    This is correct. It is syntactically ambiguous but pragmatically quite clear.
    – Dan Bron
    Mar 14, 2017 at 12:43
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    Thanks. I personally agree with the second option (seems more logical to me), but my teacher said that by some "word order rules" "successfully" can only refer to "raises", so I asked the question.
    – Alexey
    Mar 14, 2017 at 14:02
  • @Alexey OK, I cannot speak to that. I did first parse the sentence by attaching "successfully" to "raises", and it's only while writing the answer and being baffled by how little sense the whole thing made that I realized my error; however the alternate parsing doesn't shock me or anything. That The Guardian wrote this suggests that if this rule exists, either isn't strictly respected in common usage or it's a "fake rule". It does change the nature of your question and make it a lot more interesting: I suggest you edit your question, and be as specific as possible about what your teacher said.
    – Oosaka
    Mar 14, 2017 at 14:28
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    This latter interpretation is supported by the first sentence of the article: Scientists have succeeded in cryogenically freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue for the first time, in an advance that could pave the way for organs to be stored for months or years.
    – Mathieu K.
    Mar 15, 2017 at 22:20

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