Constituency Tests and Disambiguation
Syntactic ambiguity characterizes sentences which can be interpreted in different ways depending solely on how one perceives syntactic connections between words and arranges them into phrases. Possible interpretations of the sentence They killed the man with a gun:
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- 'The man was shot'.
- 'The man who was killed had a gun with him'.
The ambiguity of this sentence results from two possible arrangements into constituents:
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- They killed .
- They killed .
In the first sentence, with a gun is an independent constituent with instrumental meaning. In the second sentence, it is embedded in the noun phrase the man with a gun and is modifying the noun man. The autonomy of the unit with a gun in the first interpretation can be tested by the answer ellipsis test:
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- How did they kill the man? - With a gun.
However, the same test can be used to prove that the man with a gun in the second sentence should be treated as a unit:
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- Who(m) did they kill? - The man with a gun.
The ability of constituency tests to disambiguate certain sentence in this manner bears witness to their utility. Most if not all syntacticians employ constituency tests in some form or another to arrive at the structures that they assign to sentences.
Read more about this topic: Constituent (linguistics)
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