Particle verbing is not a crime
BoingBoing reports on an unintentionally (?) hilarious lead sentence for an article about monks who wanted to watch the Pope's funeral on TV:Catholic monks living on an island off the coast of Wales have flown in a satellite dish to watch the Pope's funeral.
They refer to the sentence as a "crime against the English language," an assessment which I find, well, unfortunate. It's merely an example of my personal favourite kind of structural ambiguity, particle verb/prepositional phrase homonymy. (A similar example appears in the anecdotal World War II ambiguous headline, "British push bottles up German rear", though there you've also got homonymy on the third-person singular verb/zero-derivation noun "push" at work. See also several entries in the tombstone game, particularly "The Sheep Look Up John Brunner".)
If this were Language Log or Semantic Compositions, I'd have something pithy and meaningful to say about ambiguity and what a fascinating and important problem it is (just ask oralelk), but (1) this isn't, (2) I'm tired, and (3) the humour value entertains me more than the research about it, at least while I'm working in a different field. But it is a neat problem, and one which I find especially confounding because I don't see a visible pattern in what makes one reading normal and one funny; clearly no one else does either, otherwise it wouldn't be an open problem. (On the other hand, given that my current avenue of research deals with extracting patterns from human intuition without requiring humans to specify why their intuition says what it does, maybe it's related after all.)
They refer to the sentence as a "crime against the English language," an assessment which I find, well, unfortunate. It's merely an example of my personal favourite kind of structural ambiguity, particle verb/prepositional phrase homonymy. (A similar example appears in the anecdotal World War II ambiguous headline, "British push bottles up German rear", though there you've also got homonymy on the third-person singular verb/zero-derivation noun "push" at work. See also several entries in the tombstone game, particularly "The Sheep Look Up John Brunner".)
If this were Language Log or Semantic Compositions, I'd have something pithy and meaningful to say about ambiguity and what a fascinating and important problem it is (just ask oralelk), but (1) this isn't, (2) I'm tired, and (3) the humour value entertains me more than the research about it, at least while I'm working in a different field. But it is a neat problem, and one which I find especially confounding because I don't see a visible pattern in what makes one reading normal and one funny; clearly no one else does either, otherwise it wouldn't be an open problem. (On the other hand, given that my current avenue of research deals with extracting patterns from human intuition without requiring humans to specify why their intuition says what it does, maybe it's related after all.)