Re: Modifiers by simile
| From: | Rick Harrison <rick@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, October 29, 2007, 18:58 |
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On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:16:55 -0500, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw@...> wrote:
>To a listener, this is ambiguous: does "color-of-wood" modify "microwave"
>or "clock"?
This is a general syntactic ambiguity issue. It is not specifically caused by or related to
your "modifiers by simile" idea. In the English sentence "I saw old and rusty cars and
houses," does "old and rusty" apply only to "cars" or also to "houses"? And then there's
the famous example phrase "pretty little girls school".
Natural languages manage to survive while having such ambiguities because 99.5% of the
population can figure out what was meant based on context and shared cultural
assumptions. A small minority of people are especially bothered by ambiguity. I call them
"ambiguphobes." (This is not a derogatory term any more than "arachnophobe" or
"allurophobe" is derogatory.) If you're an ambiguphobe, you will probably want to spend
some time identifying and eliminating the syntactic ambiguities in your conlang.
--
Rick
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