Re: off topic: Grammer Question

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

> a Chinese silk wedding dress (which happens to leave it open whether
> it's the silk or the dress which is Chinese).
It is also leaves it open whether it is the dress or the wedding that
is silk. I do understand that silk weddings are rare.
 Stacked adjectives in English produce lots of ambiguity; it was an
obvious early constraint on syntactic theories that, for such
structural (i.e., non-lexical) ambiguities distinct structures get
assigned. Stacked adjectives were easy, since simple bracketing
(equivalent to tree structures) could handle them. Harder were
examples like "Mary took off John's pants" or, the very different kind,
"Flying planes can be dangerous".

David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103
On May 24, 2005, at 2:12 PM, John wrote:
> -- some short blue denim jeans
> - an awful old stair carpet