Call to all English Majors: Mind Bender

[Just Sayin]

Which one has the telescope?

I saw a person on a boat with a telescope.

[wh]

Which one has the telescope?

I saw a person on a boat with a telescope.

Let me preface my answer by saying that the last grammar course I took was in the Stone Age, and even then I took no more grammar or lit than absolutely required.  It's confusing (which I guess is the point), but, if I had to choose, I would say the boat has the telescope.  This goes way back, but I vaguely recall a rule of thumb to place a modifier closest to the word you want it to modify, which in this case would be boat. 

[Just Sayin]

Searching for an explanation, I found this:

Ambiguous expressions have more than one distinct meaning....

....Other structural ambiguities arise when modifiers have multiple possible attachment sites, even in the absence of coordination.  The standard example of this is We saw a man with a telescope, where with a telescope may be taken as modifying a man or saw a man, resulting in two interpretations with very different truth conditions.  In sentences with two prepositional phrases at the end (such as We saw a man in a strange hat with a telescope), the number of possible parses goes up to 5; and, as the number of PPs increases, the number of parses explodes.  More precisely, as Church and Patil (1982) argue, the number of parses increases with the Catalan numbers, a function that increases faster than any polynomial function.

https://web.stanford.edu/~wasow/Ambiguity.pdf

Also: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e3b3/a88b5456d79c34b34fe48b8257eb4ec1bad4.pdf

[wh]

Searching for an explanation, I found this:

Ambiguous expressions have more than one distinct meaning....

....Other structural ambiguities arise when modifiers have multiple possible attachment sites, even in the absence of coordination.  The standard example of this is We saw a man with a telescope, where with a telescope may be taken as modifying a man or saw a man, resulting in two interpretations with very different truth conditions.  In sentences with two prepositional phrases at the end (such as We saw a man in a strange hat with a telescope), the number of possible parses goes up to 5; and, as the number of PPs increases, the number of parses explodes.  More precisely, as Church and Patil (1982) argue, the number of parses increases with the Catalan numbers, a function that increases faster than any polynomial function.

https://web.stanford.edu/~wasow/Ambiguity.pdf

Also: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e3b3/a88b5456d79c34b34fe48b8257eb4ec1bad4.pdf

Clearly above my pay grade.  lol

[Just Sayin]

Searching for an explanation, I found this:

Ambiguous expressions have more than one distinct meaning.... ....Other structural ambiguities arise when modifiers have multiple possible attachment sites, even in the absence of coordination.  The standard example of this is We saw a man with a telescope, where with a telescope may be taken as modifying a man or saw a man, resulting in two interpretations with very different truth conditions.  In sentences with two prepositional phrases at the end (such as We saw a man in a strange hat with a telescope), the number of possible parses goes up to 5; and, as the number of PPs increases, the number of parses explodes.  More precisely, as Church and Patil (1982) argue, the number of parses increases with the Catalan numbers, a function that increases faster than any polynomial function.

https://web.stanford.edu/~wasow/Ambiguity.pdf Also: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e3b3/a88b5456d79c34b34fe48b8257eb4ec1bad4.pdf

Clearly above my pay grade.  lol

Your pay grade? Mine too. Hell, I thought that there was only one correct grammatical sentence. I suspected that there would be a rule to sort this out. Or that it was just a poorly written statement. Who'da thunk?