1072: Syntactic Ambiguity: Past Participles Nov 15, 2017

Syntactic ambiguity [1] is a problem that speakers, and especially writers of English must deal with fairly regularly. This happens when one word can act as two parts of speech, and there is no way to determine which decidedly, given its linguistic context. This happens with present participles that can appear like adjectives, e.g. "visiting relatives can be boring" but this also happens, perhaps unsurprisingly, with past participles. In this case, the confusion would usually surround whether something is a passive verb or an adjective, such as in "plans can get complicated". However, it doesn't really matter. Here, there is less of a distinction needed than was the case with present participles, because the words function like adjectives not in spite of the passive nature of the participles but indeed because of it, largely.