Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Test your knowledge

Exercise 7

An important difference between natural languages and artificial languages is that

natural language is full of ambiguous structures (which, of course, would be

devastating in an artificial language used e.g. for computer programming). The source

of ambiguity may be (a) lexical, when a given lexical item has more than one meaning

in the lexicon, e.g. bank, chip or light, or (b) structural, when the same set of strings

can be analysed in different ways, e.g. in I saw the girl with the telescope. In this case

either I had the telescope and saw the girl with the help of it, or I saw a girl having a

telescope. In the first interpretation with the telescope is the adjunct of the verb phrase,

in the second interpretation it is the adjunct of the noun phrase. Of course, taking into

consideration the great number of potentially ambiguous structures it seems to be

surprising that misunderstanding happens relatively infrequently. This can be

explained by the support of the context itself which very often rules out one (or more)

of the potential interpretations.

Provide a tree-structure analysis for the following ambiguous nominal expression:

(1) an analysis of sentences with several mistakes

Exercise 8

The following DP is ambiguous:

(1) [DP one of the children’s book’s]

Disambiguate the above DP by using it in two sentences and give the tree structure

of the DP with both meanings.

Exercise 9

The following sentence has ambiguous syntactic structure. Determine the ambiguities

using an appropriate constituency test for each meaning.

(1) Jane wanted to try on a pair of jeans in the shop window.