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  • What does the sentence "Ingrid saw the martian with a telescope" mean?

  • Seems pretty straightforward, right?

  • There's a martian, it has a telescope, and Ingrid is seeing it.

  • "But wait!" about half of you are saying right now,

  • "that’s not at all what I thought it meant."

  • "I thought it meant that Ingrid had the telescope and she’s using it to look at the martian."

  • Well, youre not wrong either.

  • This sentence is ambiguous.

  • In one meaning martian has the telescope, in the other meaning Ingrid has it.

  • So how is it that one sentence can have two different meanings?

  • Well, the difference between the two meanings is who has the telescope.

  • In other words, which part of the sentence "with a telescope" is modifying.

  • Under one meaning, "with a telescope" is modifying "the martian."

  • In this case, we don’t know anything about the seeing.

  • Under the other meaning Ingrid has the telescope and now "with a telescope" is modifying "saw".

  • How did Ingrid see the martian? With a telescope.

  • Which martian did she see? We haven’t said anything about this.

  • Arrows like this are great, but they're kinda imprecise.

  • Is the arrow pointing to "the"? Is it pointing to "martian"? Is it pointing to both of them?

  • With just an arrow we don’t really know.

  • Instead we use what linguists call a tree structure diagram.

  • You might recognize it from this video.

  • Let’s start with a basic example.

  • Here’s our sentence. What can we figure out about it?

  • One thing you might notice is that if we swap

  • "Ingrid" and "the martian" we get a different sentence,

  • but it’s still perfectly good.

  • That wouldn’t be the case if we swapped "Ingrid" and "saw",

  • and it wouldn’t even be true if we swapped "Ingrid" and "martian", leaving "the" behind.

  • So there’s something really special about "Ingrid" and "the martian".

  • Theyre sort of the same thing.

  • We call them NPs for noun phrases.

  • They both have nouns in them,

  • but they can also have other things like the determiner "the".

  • If were talking about NPs then what about the verb?

  • Just like the noun has a noun phrase the verb has a verb phrase.

  • And we also have an "S" that stands for sentence.

  • Now what do we do with the "with a telescope" part?

  • Since "with" is a preposition well call it a Prepositional Phrase.

  • And since I’m not worried about the internal phrase structure of the PP,

  • I’m going to use this triangle to indicate the whole phrase at once.

  • Let’s start with what happens if the martian has the telescope.

  • Since the whole thing "the martian with a telescope" is what Ingrid saw,

  • "with a telescope" has to be part of the martian's noun phrase.

  • Now what happens if the telescope is associated with seeing?

  • Who did Ingrid see? the martian.

  • How did Ingrid see? with a telescope.

  • Now the prepositional phrase is up here.

  • You can read the linear order of the sentence off the tree by reading along the bottom.

  • "Ingrid saw the martian with a telescope."

  • But notice when we do this, it doesn’t matter where the prepositional phrase attaches.

  • Whether it’s up here at the VP level or down here with the NP,

  • it’s still going to give us the linear order that puts the prepositional phrase

  • right at the very end.

  • Linguists call this phenomenon attachment ambiguity,

  • since the confusion arises from the fact that the linear order isn't giving the listener

  • clear information about where the PP attaches.

  • So what? Is this just a weird property of sentences with the word "telescope" in them?

  • Probably not.

  • Let’s try it with a whole nother set of words.

  • What about the sentence "I wrote the letters on the kitchen table."?

  • This sentence is also ambiguous.

  • Under one reading the letters are currently on the kitchen table and I wrote them.

  • Under the other reading "the kitchen table" goes up here with the VP.

  • And in this configuration the letters were written at the kitchen table,

  • but they could be anywhere right now.

  • Here are some more sentences that are ambiguous. You should think about them!

  • "Edna hit a yeti with a frying pan."

  • "I bought this unicycle for my best friend"

  • "Nigel remembered the concert after the rainstorm"

  • It’s good practice to sit down and think about the different possible readings that

  • each linear order could have.

  • Bonus!

  • Here are two more ambiguous phrases that have slightly different attachment ambiguity.

  • "I will eat the pie that you will bake tomorrow."

  • "One-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater"

What does the sentence "Ingrid saw the martian with a telescope" mean?

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構造的曖昧さ - Syntax Video #3 (Structural Ambiguity - Syntax Video #3)

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    Karenhsiao に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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