A Corpus View on a Couple of Structurally Ambiguous Sentences

Abstract

Ambiguity has played a central role in the formation of modern grammatical theory. The article revisits the topic of structural ambiguity in particular, by looking closely at the sentences ‘The shooting of the hunters is terrible’ and ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’, both taken from Chomsky’s works. The question posed is whether the data provided by corpora verify their ambiguity.

Keywords

• ambiguity
• corpus linguistics
• lexical ambiguity
• pragmatic ambiguity
• structural ambiguity