1013: Syntactic Ambiguity: Present Participles Sep 17, 2017

English syntax, with the exception of a few pronouns, relies on word-order to provide syntax. Most of the time this is fine for both speaker and listener, but in addition to confusion that arise from relying on prepositions carrying multiple senses, and therefore provide two different surface structures such as in "she hit the man with flowers", the fluidity of English lexical classes and participles can lead to clauses that are syntactically ambiguous. For instance, the sentence "visiting relatives can be boring" has two possible meanings, because 'visiting' could be a present participle, for which someone could substitute 'to visit', but also could act adjectivally, modifying 'relatives'. In speech the distinction is usually made with tone, but there is no guarantee of that this will happen; in writing, there is no way to get around this issue in that example except by opting for different words, even were someone to try to use punctuation.