Exercise 7
An important difference between natural languages and artificial languages is that natural language is full of ambiguous structures (which, of course, would be devastating in an artificial language used e.g. for computer programming). The source of ambiguity may be (a) lexical, when a given lexical item has more than one meaning in the lexicon, e.g. bank, chip or light, or (b) structural, when the same set of strings can be analysed in different ways, e.g. in I saw the girl with the telescope. In this case either I had the telescope and saw the girl with the help of it, or I saw a girl having a telescope. In the first interpretation with the telescope is the adjunct of the verb phrase, in the second interpretation it is the adjunct of the noun phrase. Of course, taking into consideration the great number of potentially ambiguous structures it seems to be surprising that misunderstanding happens relatively infrequently. This can be explained by the support of the context itself which very often rules out one (or more) of the potential interpretations.
Provide a tree-structure analysis for the following ambiguous nominal expression:
| (1) | an analysis of sentences with several mistakes |