4 ms·
This is known as an attachment ambiguity. The classical sentence is "The man saw the woman with the telescope." I'm afraid it is not limited to English, and a
by adimitrov 11y ago
This is known as an attachment ambiguity. The classical sentence is "The man saw the woman with the telescope."
I'm afraid it is not limited to English, and a very common phenomenon across many languages that use prepositional phrases. Languages that do avoid these usually have a complicated case system. Even there, we have other ambiguity-types that are also common in English, such as relative clauses, quantifiers, etc.
Ambiguity is a natural part of languages. It can be fun :-)
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4566 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4566
- thaumasiotes 11y agoMy favorite standard example sentence (of ambiguity, that is) is "we saw her duck".
- eru 11y agoTime flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
- fenomas 11y agoYesterday I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know.
- adimitrov 11y agoThat's an example of lexical ambiguity. You can have a lot of fun with lexical ambiguity, especially with polysemous words, e.g. "John and his driver's license expired last week." (This particular kind is an example of a zeugma.)