LIN241H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Financial Institution, If And Only If, Underspecification
Document Summary
Structural: sentences have different interpretations that cannot be reduced to lexical ambiguity, differences in interpretation are generated by differences in structure. Lexico-syntactic ambiguity e. g. , teacher strikes idle kids lexical and syntactically ambiguous sentence. Changed the tense of the verb to perfect struck strikes: i) protests (n); ii) hit forcibly (v) Structural ambiguity e. g. , bill hit the man with the hammer. Pp with a hammer modifies either the man or bill. If an expression x (constituent or word) modifies an expression y, then x must c- command y. C-command (informal: a node c-commands its sisters and all the daughters of its sisters. C-command (formal: node a c-commands node b if every node dominating a also dominates b, and neither a nor b dominates the other. Syntactic ambiguity is not restricted to modification. E. g. , john told the girl that bill liked the story. The story was told to the girl that bill liked that bill liked is a modifier.
