632: Ambiguity: Prepositions Aug 31, 2016

There is a great deal of possible ambiguity in English as to the intended meaning of a sentence, especially without other context. An example of this is the sentence, "she paid the man with gold". Although there may be one meaning that you, individually, interpreted first, there are two ways that this could be understood. One way is that 'gold' is the currency with which the man was paid. The other is that the man already had gold when he was paid by the woman; she could have paid him in silver or dollar bills while the gold was just to further describe the man. Because prepositional phrases can be part of a verbal phrase, or also can be separate and modify a noun phrase, there is no way of knowing for sure.