The following is a partial list of linguistic example sentences illustrating various linguistic phenomena.
Different types of ambiguity which are possible in language.
Demonstrations of words which have multiple meanings dependent on context.
Demonstrations of ambiguity between alternative syntactic structures underlying a sentence.
Demonstrations of how incremental and (at least partially) local syntactic parsing leads to infelicitous constructions and interpretations.
Punctuation can be used to introduce ambiguity or misunderstandings where none needed to exist. One well known example, [18] for comedic effect, is from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (ignoring the punctuation provides the alternate reading).
Some prescriptive grammar prohibits "preposition stranding": ending sentences with prepositions. [19]
Sentences with unexpected endings.
Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible.
Demonstrations of sentences where the semantic interpretation is bound to context or knowledge of the world.
Conditionals where the prejacent ("if" clause) is not strictly required for the consequent to be true.
A famous example for lexical ambiguity in Persian is the following sentence: [43]
بخشش لازم نیست اعدامش کنید
It can be read either as:
which means "Forgiveness! no need to execute him/her"
Or as:
which means "Forgiveness not needed! execute her/him"
Groucho said, as everybody knows, 'I shot an elephant in my pajamas.' This sets up the infamous joke: 'How an elephant got into my pajamas I can't imagine. [Laughter].' What, exactly, happened here? We take the following to be untendentious as far as it goes: the conventions of English are in force, and they entail that there are two ways to read the set-up sentence. Either it expresses the thought (I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant) or it expresses the thought (I) (shot (an elephant in my pajamas)).
'Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it' . . . : there is some single thing Y in the universe such that for every X in the universe if X is a farmer and Y is a donkey and X owns Y, then X beats Y. So the problem with the donkey sentence is that the scope of the variable corresponding to the donkey must be contained within the antecedent of the implication to prevent requiring the unconditional existence of the donkey. But the scope of the donkey variable must contain the consequent of the implication to allow the anaphoric reference!
The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped.
The 'rule' was apparently created ex nihilo in 1672 by the essayist John Dryden, who took exception to Ben Jonson's phrase the bodies that those souls were frighted from (1611). Dryden was in effect suggesting that Jonson should have written the bodies from which those souls were frighted, but he offers no reason for preferring this to the original.
'This is the kind of tedious [sometimes "pedantic"] nonsense up with which I will not put!' . . . Verdict: An invented phrase put in Churchill's mouth
This example is based on a much-quoted joke attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, who is said to have annotated some clumsy evasion of stranding in a document with the remark: This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. Unfortunately, the joke fails because it depends on a mistaken grammatical analysis: in I will not put up with this sort of English the sequence up with this sort of English is not a constituent, up being a separate complement of the verb (in the traditional analysis it is an adverb). Churchill's example thus does not demonstrate the absurdity of using PP fronting instead of stranding: it merely illustrates the ungrammaticality resulting from fronting something which is not a constituent.
Hold the news reader's nose squarely waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam.
Gdaa-naanaanaa, Aanaa, naa? . . . 'We should fetch Anna, shouldn't we?'
Sir J. Harington has an Epigram (L. i. E. 83.) 'Of writing with double pointing,' which is thus introduced. 'It is said that King Edward, of Carnarvon, lying at Berkeley Castle, prisoner, a cardinal wrote to his keeper, Edwardum occidere noli, timere bonum est, which being read with the point at timere, it cost the king his life.'
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