3 ms·
Not a native speaker, but if Ayn Rand is your mother I'd blame the first comma for the ambiguity. "To my mother Ayn Rand, and God."
by UweSchmidt 10y ago
Not a native speaker, but if Ayn Rand is your mother I'd blame the first comma for the ambiguity.
"To my mother Ayn Rand, and God."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- savanaly 10y agoThe problem isn't that there doesn't exist a sentence that maps onto only the meaning that Ayn Rand is your mother, it's that there exists a sentence which one could reasonably arrive at that maps on to both the meaning where Ayn Rand is your mother and the meaning where she's not.
- dublinben 10y agoAppositive clauses like that often require a comma. [0] I'd argue that this one does, even though it makes the sentence more confusing as a whole. [0] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/596/01/ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/596/01/
- rdiddly 10y agoIf your mother is Ayn Rand, you've got bigger problems. Sorry, couldn't resist.
- SamBam 10y agoBut that's just grammatically wrong, in English. Appositive clauses require a comma. Forgetting God, you can just look at the sentence "To my mother, Ayn Rand." We put a comma there because the object of the sentence is "mother," and then we're clarifying who "mother" is. We'd only omit the comma if "Mother Ayn Rand" were a noun phrase all by itself, like "Father John." Similarly: "This is to my arch-nemesis, Ayn Rand, who always doubted me." The commas are necessary there for the same reason. (How did Ayn Rand enter this discussion..?)