Today’s One Big Happy:
Ruthie intends High Attachment for the adverb again, with the adverb modifying the VP with head feel, and that’s a possible parsing. But Low Attachment, with again modifying the VP with head smashing, is the default parsing, and that’s how Ruthie’s grandmother understands things.
Today’s One Big Happy:]
Once again, Ruthie seizes the wrong fork of an ambiguity: the waiter intends “condition how“, but Ruthie understands it as “manner how“.
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
The ambiguity in selling … drugs for … prostitutes (which turns on the function of the PP for … prostitutes in the larger structure) briefly distracts the characters from the image-mong(er)ing that is their pressing concern, when it really isn’t important which of the readings is the correct one; either way, they’ve got a huge scandal that’s going to take a lot of media management. (more…)
In the NYT Sunday Review 5/3/15, in “What Black Moms Know” by Yvonda Gault Caviness:
Thankfully, I am a black mom. Like many of my fellow sisters, I don’t have time for all that foolishness [about child-rearing].
I stumbled a bit on fellow sisters, though I understood that it was in no way contradictory; fellow here does not refer to a man or men, but to someone “sharing a particular activity, quality, or condition with someone or something: they urged the troops not to fire on their fellow citizens” (NOAD2). Still, the noun fellow is surely most frequently used for informal reference to a man or boy (there’s a fellow at the door), and this use can interfere with the (gender-neutral) ‘someone sharing an attribute’ use.
Caught on tv, in the NCIS episode “Dead and Unburied” (#4.5) (2006). The team is examining a murder scene, studying the carpet intently:
Dr. Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard [the medical examiner]: Looks like sisal. It’s a naturally stiff fiber woven from the leaf of the cactus plant. It doesn’t matt, trap dust, build static, makes it ideal for carpeting. Personally, I prefer a good shag. [Gibbs and McGee just look at him while Palmer grins like a loon]
Ducky uses the noun shag referring to a type of rug, but everyone else hears the nominalization of the verb shag ‘fuck’. Merriment ensues.
A photo sent by a friend, with a note referring to “the man in the uniform behind the left shoulder” of Barack Obama:
There are two men in uniform right behind Obama; how are we to interpret “left shoulder” here? From Obama’s point of view (in which case the man in question is to the right of Obama in the photo)? Or from our point of view, looking at the photo?
The potential ambiguity can be avoided by saying “to the right/left of Obama in the photo”, but (as it turns out) my friend has a principled usage here.
Posted on Facebook by Leith Chu:
(#1)
Oh my: the verb pork, the verb pull, the verb rub, all available with sexual senses.
In an NYT opinion column on Sunday (the 5th), a Jenny Wilkinson piece about her sexual assault at U.Va., including this:
The weak punishment meted out to the student whom the university found responsible for assaulting me doesn’t seem to have been unusual; as far as I know, no one has been expelled after being found responsible for sexual assault by the university.
The crucial part is bolfaced: in the intended reading, the VP being found responsible for sexual assault is modified by by the university (alternatively: being found responsible by the university for sexual assault). But in fact the boldfaced material has another potential reading, in which by the university modifies sexual assault. This would have the modifier by the university parsed with preceding material by Low Attachment (LA), and LA is, ceteris paribus, the default parsing, but in this case that reading is preposterous, so High Attachment (HA) applies, and presumably readers don’t even notice the possibility of LA.
From yesterday’s NYT:
[Philadelphia police commissioner Charles H.] Ramsey has emerged recently as a national figure in the policing debate. He leads President Barack Obama’s policing task force, which recently made recommendations on how to improve trust between law enforcement and minorities. “I wasn’t selected because the president thought we had the perfect police department,” he told reporters Monday.
The crucial point is this quote from Ramsey:
(1) I wasn’t selected because the president thought we had the perfect police department.
Out of context, (1) is ambiguous, between a reading in which NEG has scope over the because clause:
(1a) It wasn’t because the president thought we had the perfect police department that I was selected.
and a reading in which the because clause is outside the scope of NEG:
(1b) It was because the president thought we had the perfect police department that I wasn’t selected.
Given the context in the story — Ramsey was in fact selected — (1a) must be the reading Ramsey intended, and I’d expect readers of the sentence in context would not even have noticed that it had another interpretation.