5 ms·
I'm confused about your sentence parse notation. Isn't "fast" an adjective in one of the interpretations (namely the one parsed the same as "The company couldn'
by baddox 6y ago
I'm confused about your sentence parse notation. Isn't "fast" an adjective in one of the interpretations (namely the one parsed the same as "The company couldn't make the car safe enough")?
Doesn't that "safe" example point out something else? The example with "fast" is only ambiguous because it's common to use "fast" as both an adjective and an adverb? The sentence with "safe" doesn't sound to me like an acceptable way to say that the company's manufacturing process was too dangerous.
- pwinnski 6y agoFor the alternative meaning, I think you'd say, "The company couldn't make the car safely enough." So yeah, adjective and adverb, I think you're right. For that matter, "The company couldn't make the car quickly enough" would resolve the ambiguity in one direction, but I guess not the other.
- foldr 6y agoIt's true that there might also be a lexical ambiguity here, but the two interpretations do also correspond to different syntactic structures. The adjectival phrase attaches to an NP whereas the adverbial phrase attaches to the VP (or thereabouts).