Exercises C2 : Syntactic ambiguities in English (answers)

These exercises draw on the C2 insight that syntactic ambiguities behave differently across languages — explore how gender, inflection, and structure disambiguate meaning in ways English often cannot.

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Exercice 1 — Identifying Syntactic Ambiguity

Choose the answer that best explains why each English sentence is syntactically ambiguous at C2 level.

1. The sentence 'I saw the man with the telescope' is ambiguous because:
2. Which feature of French most reliably resolves the kind of nominal ambiguity that English leaves open in a sentence like 'The teacher praised the student's work as expected'?
3. In the sentence 'Visiting relatives can be boring', the ambiguity arises from:
4. Why does English inflection fail to resolve the ambiguity in 'The professors questioned the students thought were responsible'?

Correction

1. B) The prepositional phrase 'with the telescope' can modify either 'saw' or 'the man'.
2. B) French gender agreement on adjectives and determiners clarifies which noun a modifier attaches to.
3. C) The gerund 'visiting' functioning as either a verb in a reduced clause or a pre-nominal adjective.
4. B) English nouns carry no case marking, so it is impossible to determine whether 'the students' is the object of 'questioned' or the subject of 'thought'.

Exercice 2 — Matching Ambiguity Types to Examples

Match each ambiguous English sentence on the left with the correct type of syntactic ambiguity on the right. Write the full label as your answer.

1. Sentence: 'She decided on the boat.' — Match this to its ambiguity type.
2. Sentence: 'Every student loves a teacher.' — Match this to its ambiguity type.
3. Sentence: 'The horse raced past the barn fell.' — Match this to its ambiguity type.
4. Sentence: 'I went to the bank.' (in a context where both a financial institution and a riverbank are relevant) — Match this to its ambiguity type.

Correction

1. PP-attachment ambiguity — a prepositional phrase can modify two different constituents
2. Scope ambiguity — a quantifier or negation can take wide or narrow scope
3. Garden-path ambiguity — the parser initially commits to an incorrect syntactic structure
4. Lexical ambiguity — a single word carries two unrelated meanings

Exercice 3 — Advanced Metalinguistic Gap-Fill

Complete each sentence with the precise linguistic term or phrase that fits the C2-level discussion of syntactic ambiguity, inflection, and cross-linguistic contrast. Write the full corrected sentence as your answer.

1. Because English nouns lack ___, the syntactic role of a noun phrase — whether it acts as subject or object — must be inferred almost entirely from word order.
2. In French, the obligatory ___ between a determiner and its head noun immediately signals the grammatical gender of that noun, a cue that English determiners such as 'the' simply do not provide.
3. A ___ sentence is one in which the reader initially assigns an incorrect syntactic structure because the grammar temporarily permits two competing analyses before additional input forces a revision.
4. When a single surface string maps onto two distinct underlying ___, linguists say the sentence exhibits structural — rather than merely lexical — ambiguity.

Correction

1. Because English nouns lack morphological case marking, the syntactic role of a noun phrase — whether it acts as subject or object — must be inferred almost entirely from word order.
2. In French, the obligatory agreement between a determiner and its head noun immediately signals the grammatical gender of that noun, a cue that English determiners such as 'the' simply do not provide.
3. A garden-path sentence is one in which the reader initially assigns an incorrect syntactic structure because the grammar temporarily permits two competing analyses before additional input forces a revision.
4. When a single surface string maps onto two distinct underlying phrase-structure representations, linguists say the sentence exhibits structural — rather than merely lexical — ambiguity.