🎴 Flashcard Mode

Syntactic Ambiguity and Disambiguation

Card1 / 15
Mastered0
Review0
QuestionClick to flip

Which of the following sentences is syntactically ambiguous?

AnswerClick to flip back
A
The man saw the woman with the telescope.
💡 Explanation:

The sentence "The man saw the woman with the telescope." is syntactically ambiguous because the prepositional phrase "with the telescope" can modify either the verb "saw" or the noun "woman". This ambiguity can be disambiguated by adding a comma after the word "woman", which makes it clear that the prepositional phrase modifies the verb "saw".

Change Mode