Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook on 7/23, this headline for a story that day by Quinn Foley:

Children’s Choir Surprised Their Teacher With Cancer

The intended reading was that their teacher with cancer should be parsed as a constituent, a NP understood as ‘their teacher who has cancer’ — that’s Low Attachment (LA) for the modifier with cancer, and LA is the default parsing for such modifiers (see other postings in the “Attachment” Page on this blog). Despite that, it’s very hard not to understand the modifier as having High Attachment (HA), modifying surprised their teacher, a reading that’s both ludicrous and distressing.

For the moment, I’m just puzzled by this fact.

The site is HooplaHa: Life with a Smile, a site that collects amusing videos. The URL Steven provided — here — is one I haven’t figured out how to navigate to get to a print story.

This entry was posted on July 30, 2015 at 10:16 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Attachment, Modification, Parsing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.