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April 5[edit]

Identifying object in a sentence?[edit]

A: I dismiss someone's point with evidence.

B: I dismiss someone's point with evidence.

I underlined what I thought was the object in the sentence above.

Which is correct? Thank you in advance.

--Reciprocater (Talk) 13:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

B. Bazza (talk) 14:09, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- @Bazza 7: Thank you so much! Could you teach me how did you know? What if there really exists the evidence in someone's point?
- A person with a dream. = A person who has a dream.

Likewise, soneone's point with evidence = Someone's point which includes evidence.

My answer is A or both. But why is A not correct?

--Reciprocater (Talk) 15:00, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The usual reading of the sentence, in the absence of any context, would be that it is the person doing the dismissing, not the point, that has the evidence—that is, that the prepositional phrase "with evidence" is adverbial, modifying dismiss, rather than adjectival, modifying point. If the point is backed up with evidence, why would someone dismiss it? Deor (talk) 15:59, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for your time! If the point is backed up with evidence, why would someone dismiss it? Because the evidence might be thought of as not convincing and to be dismissed by a piece of stronger evidence from someone? --Reciprocater (Talk) 17:25, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That is true, the most likely reading of the sentence is that the person is saying the equivalent of, "I dismiss someone's point, and I do so based on evidence". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous. It has the same type of ambiguity as the well-known example "I saw the man with the binoculars". Suppose in an argument Joe comes up with two points, one not supported by any evidence, and the other with some evidence. Then you say, "Listen Joe, I dismiss your first point because it is just a rumour; it doesn't have any supporting evidence." Then Joe says, "What about my other point, my point with evidence." You respond, "I dismiss your point with evidence as well, because the evidence is not credible." It looks like the example is a test question from a graded exercise or even exam. I think they should have picked a syntactically unambiguous sentence for this test. --Lambiam 16:21, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much for your detailed answer! Does it seem that syntactically ambiguous is not avoidable? It looks like the example is a test question from a graded exercise or even exam. Actually, I developed such confusion when I was writing a message to an administrator at User_talk:Yamla#Dispute_resolution_choices. During I was writing, I was uncertain what kind of meaning would Yamla read. I was afraid that Yamla got a different narrative from what I expected so I tried a lot of sentence structures there.--Reciprocater (Talk) 17:25, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It would be clearer if there were a comma after point. Deor (talk) 18:58, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the knowledge you've imparted! --Reciprocater (Talk) 04:25, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

General comment: this thread would be a lot more readable without the huge green boxes around each instance of one person's signature. Just because you can do that sort of of thing doesn't mean you should. --69.159.8.46 (talk) 01:21, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for letting me know that. I will adjust my signature.--Reciprocater (Talk) 04:25, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. --69.159.8.46 (talk) 06:19, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

New signature Reciprocater (Talk) 17:12, 6 April 2020 (UTC) debut! The designer is User talk:Lambiam! I feel priviledged to adopt it! Gratitude![reply]

The general term for this in English is "prepositional phrase attachment" (e.g. the ambiguity of "I shot the man with the gun"), though there doesn't seem to be much about it on Wikipedia... AnonMoos (talk) 21:09, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Yep, prepositional phrase attachment hasn't been created yet. --Reciprocater (Talk) 04:25, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There is a brief mention of the issue at Grammatical modifier#Ambiguous and dangling modifiers. Note that it's entirely possible for it to happen without any prepositional phrases being involved. English is so flexible in the way it places adverbs that you can get a similar ambiguity this way:

I dismiss the point that Donald made handily.

Did Donald make the point handily, or am I dismissing it handily? You have to figure out what makes sense, and if they both do, then you'd better write the sentence another way if you want to be understood. --69.159.8.46 (talk) 06:19, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the example. if they both do, then you'd better write the sentence another way if you want to be understood. Could you please teach me how to write it another way? Thank you so much! I really want to improve my English skills. --Reciprocater (Talk) 17:20, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there's a general rule for how to do it, but usually you want to find a place for the adverb or phrase where it can only relate to one thing. For example: I handily dismiss the point that Donald made; I dismiss the point that Donald handily made. --76.71.6.31 (talk) 06:22, 9 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A BIG thank you with a lot of blessings!--Reciprocater (Talk) 14:50, 9 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To be precise, PP attachment is not the ambiguity itself. Instead, it is the task or process (or the result thereof), when parsing a phrase (usually taken to be a sentence), of attaching a PP to the correct node in the parse tree. In many cases there is no structural ambiguity (NP V PP; NP PP V NP), but for a sentence of the form NP V NP PP there is. Our Structural ambiguity article names one particular type of headline ambiguity (crash blossom) and the (only locally ambiguous) garden-path sentences. It contains three examples of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity without naming this type of ambiguity: "The woman held the baby in the green blanket", "John saw the man on the mountain with a telescope" (triply ambiguous), and "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" (semantically unambiguous unless one is a Marxist). --Lambiam 06:54, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for sharing such precious knowledge. I am absorbing! --Reciprocater (Talk) 17:30, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]