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the president will speak to small businessmen
This is a good example. You have to stretch to misinterpret this sentence. It might not be quite the stretch of some other examples ('rubber baby buggy bumpers' comes to mind) but it's still a stretch.
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Well, that's my point. The ambiguity only comes without the context or back story. Because earlier in the article (which doesn't exist) we've been describing the differences between American and British rock stars, and its the shenanigans of the former that are being pointed out. Either way, I was trying to choose a third example to show that combinatorially compounds like this are ambiguous. We tend to think of one meaning as being the right one, but that has little to do with the structure of the compound or its constituent lexical items, but more to do with its usage, or context in some story or text.
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Thanks, Jackie. As I just posted above. The strangeness of this kinds of constructions mainly comes from their being quoted out of context. If you listen to how people actually talk and read carefully how they write you see all kinds of ambiguity in their texts. People speaking usually catch these mistakes and rephrase their sentence to resolve the ambiguity, but sometimes not until others point it out.
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Of course it's a stretch, but the possibility exists and is quite useful in jokes and riddles. It all started because some folks think there are language rules, which are simple, and which take care of all problems. There are rules to language, very few of which are simple, and most of which have little to do with the grammar rules we were taught in school.
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The ambiguity only comes without the context or back story
Which is where headlines run into problems. Often they come without the requisite context. An example of this might be:
Starr Asked to Delay Report.
The normal reading of this, knowing that it was a headline in a newspaper, would be, following standard headline syntax conventions, and knowing the context of the investigation into the Clinton involvement in suspect dealing of the Whitewater Development Corporation, that independent counsel, Kenneth Starr was asked if he would delay the release of his report on the Whitewater matter. Reading the article we found that Starr himself was doing the asking.
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Thanks, Faldage. Yes, and I mentioned garden path sentences as an aside. Of course, I now wish that I hadn't mentioned any of it, but that's life.
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the possibility exists and is quite useful in jokes and riddles
Useful in jokes and riddles is one thing, I just refuse to take it seriously as a grammatical, or even syntactical problem.
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Yes, but the reading of the story just helps the reader to resolve the ambiguity. It does not get rid of its existence or the possibility of its misnterpretation. And I am not saying that I'm against clear writing. In fact at this point I'm not saying much of anything. Just backpeddling. All I was trying to say, and I admit I did it poorly, is that things are more complicated than imagined and that sometimes a hyphen might not be the solution. I mentioned commas as another possibility. Rewriting might work, too.
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to wit (this I serendipitously saw today):
"Defendant not to blame judge told"
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I just refuse to take it seriously as a grammatical, or even syntactical problem.
Well, it is a problem in natural language processing (NLP) and quite a serious one, especially for the humorless generative grammarians. Not saying it won't be solved, but perhaps not in the ways being attempted nowadays.
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