Syntax I

Let me see if I can clarify the effect of the ambiguity in the second problem of homework 2 a little bit.

There are many kinds of ambiguity that we find in language. One of them is a simple lexical ambiguity, and the example everybody always uses to illustrate lexical ambiguity is the word bank. Used as a noun, it can refer to either a financial institution (in different aspects as well, it can be the building, or the company in the abstract), or it can refer to the earthy edge of a river. This kind of ambiguity is generally considered to be relatively uninteresting when we’re studying the properties of language in general, because it’s basically an accident of history. Really, there are two words, one of them refers to the edge of a river, one to a financial institution. The historical accident is that they happen to sound the same in English. Dictionaries will sometimes mark this kind of difference with a number, like bank¹ and bank².

The kind of ambiguity we are more interested here is a structural ambiguity, which arises when two essentially different sentences (built from the same words) turn out to sound the same. In many cases, this kind of ambiguity arises with modifiers. Prepositional phrases like on the hill (or from Greece) are modifiers, adjectives and adverbs are modifiers. So, in a sentence like I saw a man with binoculars, either I have the binoculars, in which case with binoculars is taken to be an attribute of my seeing action, or the man has the binoculars, in which case with binoculars is taken to be an attribute of the man. The reason it is a structural ambiguity is that in the structure of the sentence, when we determine the object of the verb (the thing that is seen in this case), it is the man with binoculars in one case, and just the man in the other. When we start drawing trees to describe the structure of the sentences, this results in two different trees.

Now, the question that led to my writing this had to do with whether the ambiguity in the sentence about the book of cars from Greece affects whether from Greece is a constituent. Let me turn the question around a bit.

The sentence (or, perhaps better, the string of words) is structurally ambiguous because more than one structure is pronounced in that way. The structure of a sentence is basically defined in terms of its constituency. So two sentences with different constituents have different structures, even if they end up sounding the same. When you find a constituent using a constituency test, you are narrowing your focus to only those structures where the string you tested is a constituent. So, if one of the meanings of the original sentence arises from a structure in which the string you are testing is not a constituent, that meaning will not be available for your test sentence.

In the case I mentioned above, I saw a man with binoculars, the string a man with binoculars is a constituent only on the meaning where the man has the binoculars, not me. So, if we force it to be a constituent by putting it through a constituency test, say, the clefting test, we find that only that meaning survives: It is a man with binoculars that I saw. So, a man with binoculars is a constituent, but the fact that the test sentence was not ambiguous in the same way that the original sentence was suggests that a man with binoculars is not a constituent in the structure for the other meaning (where I have the binoculars).

Finally getting back to the original question, it is basically this: Are any of the structures that correspond to the several available meanings of The elated student of history received a book of cars from Greece ones in which from Greece is not a constituent?

My answer: No. From Greece is a constituent in all of the meanings.

But things are a bit more complicated than that: see part 6. I’m not actually giving away this answer only to those who read the blog (although everyone should!), because I already gave it away in part 6 on what I handed out. The tricky thing here is that, even though from Greece is a constituent in the structure for every one of the possible interpretations of the sentence, some constituency test sentences still seem to rule out some meanings. So, It’s from Greece that the elated student received a book of cars can only mean that the book arrived from Greece (and not that the cars were from Greece). The reason for that is outlined in part 6, but it has to do with a property of the test itself, rather than a property of the constituency of what is being tested.