Isidora palsalge
>I was basing what I said on what I have been teaching my daughter about
>(English) sentence diagramming from a textbook on diagramming.
Don't trust those. They lie to make things easier to learn. Though the
lies can be safely applied, they aren't any truer for that.
>Now that I look at the example sentence more carefully, though, I can see
>that there is, in fact, an ambiguity as to whether I [saw in the house] a
>man or whether it was [a man in the house] that I saw. Sorry for adding
to
>the confusion.
English doesn't make a distinction between placement of the subject of an
action and placement of the action itself, does it? So you couldn't say
that "The man saw in the house a dog" differs from "The man in the house
saw a dog".
>I don't think that it is possible to resolve the ambiguity of this example
>in English, at least not without jumping through some extrordinary
>hoops. But I also have the instinct that most English speakers will never
>notice the ambiguity, unless they are called upon to formally parse the
>sentence in some manner (such as diagramming.)
You can easily disambiguate (ooh! a new word) the sentence as follows:
"I was in the house when I saw the man." OR "In the house, I saw the man."
"I saw the man who was in the house."
~wright
one of the seven cumins