Re: THEORY: Adpositional Heads

At 04:52 PM 9/10/03 -0700, you wrote:
>Isidora Zamora wrote:
> > In this particular case, the prepositional phrase is adverbial.  It
> > modifies "saw."  I saw a man *where*?  I saw a man *in the house.*
>
>That doesn't clarify anything.  You don't say whether the act of seeing
>occurs where the seeing person is or where the seen person is or where
>they both are.  Maybe your native language has a built-in supposition of
>where seeing occurs -- but English doesn't!
My only native language is English.

I was basing what I said on what I have been teaching my daughter about
(English) sentence diagramming from a textbook on diagramming.

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.

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.)

Does the sentence "I saw a man in the house." create any ambiguity in other
languages as to whether the prepositional phrase is adverbial or
adjectival?  Is this ambiguity a problem?  If so, how can it be disambiguated?

Isidora

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