Section 18.4 Structural Ambiguity
Pronoun reference and modifier placement are problems of attachment—the reader cannot tell what a word or phrase is connected to. Structural ambiguity is a deeper version of the same problem: the sentence as a whole can be parsed in more than one way, producing two different meanings from the same string of words. What makes structural ambiguity interesting is that neither reading is wrong. Both are grammatically valid. The sentence is not broken; it is genuinely ambiguous, and only the writer knows which meaning was intended.
Some sentences are grammatically correct but structurally ambiguous. Structural ambiguity occurs when a sentence can be parsed in more than one way.
PP Attachment.
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I saw the man with binoculars. (Who had the binoculars?)
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Clear: Using binoculars, I saw the man.
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Clear: I saw the man who had binoculars.
Coordination Scope.
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Old men and women gathered. (Are the women old too?)
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Clear: Old men and old women gathered.
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Clear: Women and old men gathered.
Relative Clause Attachment.
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The senator’s daughter who was at the party left early. (Was the senator or the daughter at the party?)
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Clear: The senator’s daughter, who was at the party, left early. (daughter at party)
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Clear: The daughter of the senator who was at the party left early. (senator at party)
