The 5th Annual Clarion Write-a-thon
10 years ago
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Structural ambiguity
A competitor in a Food Network show I watched recently was described as an "award-winning cake and sugar artist". Fairly straightforward, but my language faculty at first wanted to parse this is [[award-winning cake] and [sugar artist]] rather than [award-winning [cake and sugar] artist]. This is essentially the opposite of low attachment, so I'm not sure what was going on. Perhaps a desire for coordinated phrases to be coordinated as high as possible in the syntactic structure of the phrase.
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3 comments:
Your blog is Ryan's Linguistics Blog! In syntax, I suggest to change your blog naming Ryan's Linguistic Blog since Linguistic in the phrase functions as adjective and so Ryan's possessive 's.
Your blog is Ryan's Linguistics Blog! In syntax, I suggest to change your blog naming Ryan's Linguistic Blog since Linguistic in the phrase functions as adjective and so Ryan's possessive 's. -Arie Andrasyah Isa-
Not quite. Nouns can also occupy that type of position. For instance, if I had a blog about dogs, I could call it "Ryan's dog blog". There "dog" would not be functioning as an adjective.
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