Re: THEORY: Adpositional Heads

Isidora Zamora scripsit:

> 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?
PP-attachment ambiguity comes in several flavors, and many but not all
languages allow it.  In Latin it doesn't exist, as all PPs are adverbial.
That's why anglophone Christians pray "Our Father who is in Heaven", in
imitation of the Latin "Pater noster qui es in caelis"; "Pater noster in caelis"
would be ungrammatical.

PP-attachment can also get tangled with omitted "that"-complementizers to
make a different flavor of ambiguity:  in "The conductor said at nine o'clock
the train would stop", is it the saying or the stopping that happens at 9:00?
Inserting a "that" or moving the PP to either end of the sentence clears things up.

--
De plichten van een docent zijn divers,         John Cowan
die van het gehoor ook.                         jcowan@reutershealth.com
      --Edsger Dijkstra                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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