I was talking with my mom one day a few years ago when I was first learning Arabic. I meant to say “I showed it to my uncle” and ended up saying “I shot my uncle”. Arabic past tense adds /to/ as a suffix. Take “ketab” (book) and add /to/ and it becomes “ketabto” (I wrote). I believe “showed it to” turned into “shot-ito” and interpreted as “shot” in English in the past tense.
All things considered, it could have been just a Freudian slip.
Today I misparsed one of the front page headlines in the USA Today.
“DNA tests fuel urgency to free the innocent”
I parsed this as: Subject (DNA) Verb (tests) Object (fuel urgency) Adjunct (to free the innocent), meaning that DNA was testing the urgency of fuel in order to free innocent people. It wasn’t until I parsed the whole thing that I realized this didn’t make much sense.
The correct parsing is: Subject (DNA tests) Verb (fuel) Object (urgency to free the innocent).
tests is a verb much more often than fuel is, and I reinterpreted the plural marker as the 3rd person singular agreement. The headline makes much more sense with the second parsing, but I still want to go with the first, but this is a genuine case of standing ambiguity.
Last night, I was on the phone with a friend who’d been in grad school with me. We were talking about the friendships you form in grad school and decisions some friends of ours have made to go back to school later in life.
When my friend said, “That’s why we keep our friends from grad school”, I completely misheard his intention. I interpreted the sentence to mean:
- That’s why we keep our friends from going to grad school. [Meaning: grad school is tough. Any kind person would try to prevent their friends from suffering like that.]
What he meant was:
- That’s why we keep in touch with the friends we made in grad school. [Meaning: you form close friendships during difficult experiences, and it's important to maintain those friendships past graduation.]
This error is both a lexical ambiguity and a mis-parsing. “Keep” can either mean ‘to maintain’ or ‘to prevent’. If it’s used as ‘to prevent’, then you have to prevent someone from doing something, so ‘from grad school’ is a complement of the verb. If it’s used as ‘to keep’, then ‘from grad school’ is just additional information that tells you what type of friendships you maintain, so ‘from grad school’ is an adjunct.
Both interpretations were facilitated by context. In terms of frequency, I can’t verify which sense of “keep” is more common, but I’m going to assume that the ‘hold onto something’ sense probably occurs more often.
When I was doing my reading for British Victorian literature I came across this sentence: “If they want money, work and wages are waiting for them.” When I began reading the sentence, I grouped “money, work and wages” into a list of what “they” wanted. Once I reached “are,” though, I had to reanalyze the sentence and find the subject for that verb. “Work and wages” became the subject. This was a local parsing error.
In a recent telephone conversation, a friend stated that “Anna came over yesterday before we went out to have a bite to eat.”This sentence has multiple interpertations due to its (global) syntactic ambiguity, and my initial interpretation was to think that Anna and the friend went “out” for a bite to eat, presumably at a restaurant or fast food location. It later became clear that the two “went out” to the shopping mall rather than a dining place and that Anna came over beforehand to have a bite to eat at the friend’s house. The initial statement’s ambiguity led to my error in perception and interpretation, which was later corrected through context.
Local syntactic ambiguity. Mis-parsed “firms” as a verb, took “fight” as direct object. Realized error when reached “ban”. Correct parsing has “Chinese liquor” modifying the subject noun, “firms”.
Source: Reuters.com
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