Syntactic Ambiguity

• Some Types of Syntactic Ambiguity
  (note that some of these involve lexical ambiguity as well--which ones?)
  • prepositional phrases:
    They cooked the beans in the pot on the stove with handles.
  • particle vs. preposition:
    A good pharmacist dispenses with accuracy.
    The puppy tore up the staircase.
  • complement structures
    The tourists objected to the guide that they couldn’t hear.
    She knows you like the back of her hand.
    I forgot how good beer tastes.
    Eating this often will make you fat.
  • gerund vs. participial adjective
    Visiting relatives can be boring.
    Changing schedules frequently confused passengers.
  • modifier scope within NPs
    impractical design requirements
    plastic cup holder
  • multiple gap constructions ("tough movement", etc.)
    The chicken is ready to eat.
    The contractors are rich enough to sue.
  • conjunction scope:
    Small rats and mice can sqeeze into holes or cracks in the wall.
• In sentences other than the simplest, there's likely to be some syntactic ambiguity, which makes parsing difficult.
• Syntactic ambiguity of one type or another is common across languages, but the types may differ. How?

(back to word sense disambiguation)

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