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Re: [lojban] the myth of monoparsing



2015-03-02 16:42 GMT+03:00 Hugh O'Byrne <hobyrne@gmail.com>:
There's more here than I understand.  How you would handle a particular case I have in mind would help clear things up.

"Time flies like an arrow" can be used to mean a command: use a stopwatch to measure the motion of insects in the same way you would use a stopwatch to measure the motion of a projectile from a bow, or an observation: the hours pass by as swiftly as a projectile from a bow passes.

In one case, "Time" is a verb, imperative, in the other, it is a noun, the subject of the verb "fly".  Verbs and nouns are different grammatical entities, they sit at different places in parse trees.  This makes the distinction between interpretations clearer than the example "Fred saw a plane flying over Zurich".

Can you construct a single parse tree for the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" that is complete with respect to both interpretations of the sentence, or would you consider this not to be a proper English sentence, or is there something else to say about this case?

Earlier I asked And whether we were talking about polysemy and he replied that no.

Read the first post in this thread once again please. I clearly separated cases with polysemy:

<quoting myself>
E. Such links as http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17431 don't provide nice examples since they mix polysemy with possible multiparsing.
</quote>

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