The [old men] and [women] stayed at home. The other form of syntactic ambiguity arises with nominalizations. 5. Written Assignment – Syntactic Ambiguity . grammatical ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, occurs when a sentence has more than one meaningful structure or more than one parse (Berry et al, 2006). Notice the scope of the The [old [men and women]] stayed at home. PP attaching to NP2 (the apple) is called low attachment (LA), while PP attaching to V (ate) is called high attachment (HA). ambiguity. Yet, in spite of its importance, it has yet to receive a theoretically adequate characterization. Context also determines whether the A sentence-picture matching task tested the attachment of prepositional phrase (PP) such as on the chair within an utterance like Mary ate the apple on the chair. Ambiguity is a notion important, not only to linguists, but also to philosophers. Ambiguity can be caused by the ambiguous lexicon in which a word has more than one meaning and it can also be caused by the syntactic structure. From the form of (8) there is no way of deciding whether this is the case or not.4 Here the context is unconsciously relied upon to suggest the correct interpretation of the Raymond Hickey Syntactic ambiguity in Hiberno-English Page 4 of 6 (8a) He went for a walk although it was raining. The old men and women stayed at home. Show the ambiguity by bracketing the sentence in two different ways. KEYWORDS: Syntactic ambiguity, (Complex) nominal group, Technical English. The first example has been done for you. The following sentences are syntactically ambiguous. This kind of ambiguity often involves, what linguists refer to, as scope of modification. “…the touch of her hand…” To touch is a verb. For example, Chomsky’s classic example (5) involves a subject/object ambiguity analogous to (4), as well as syncretism of the –ing suffix, resulting in syntactic ambiguity regarding the grammatical category of flying. Ambiguity happens in a sentence which contains more than one meaning. In what follows, I shall address this deficiency. 1. Add it to another noun and you have a delightful ambiguity. 1. INTRODUCTION The (complex) nominal group1 is commonly found in scientific discourse (Halliday, 1993). This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California. There is the potential for syntactic ambiguity whenever a given order of words may allow for more than one grammatical relationship. A. Structural or syntactic ambiguity, occurs when a phrase, clause or sentence can be given two or more different interpretations as a result of the arrangement of words or lexical units. Syntax • Any speaker of any human language can produce and understand an infinite number of possible sentences • Thus, we can’t possibly have a mental dictionary of all the possible sentences • Rather, we have the rules for forming sentences stored in our brains – Syntax … Flying planes can be dangerous. Analytical, prepositional phrase attachment and coordination ambiguities are among the subtypes of syntactic ambiguity which Some words can be used as a verb or a noun. Schane Ambiguity and Misunderstanding in the Law 5 by those orderings. Syntactic ambiguity resolution is influenced by multiple constraints. Putting a “the” in front of it nominalizes it into a noun. It is useful to recognize that syntactic ambiguity does not result from just the ordering of the words in the ambiguous structure. 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