Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

Yup, another favorite of mine from linguistics is:

    "We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

What is "they" referring to, and the adjective describing? Well, it depends - "ripe" would describe bananas, "hungry" would describe monkeys. The syntax alone is ambiguous!

View on HN

"They gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

now it can describe a third noun...

"They gave the monkeys the bananas in bunches because they were [adjective]"

I had an English teacher in high school who was highly attentive to this sort of construct. He would return many a paper with "VPR" marks sprinkled throughout for 'vague pronoun reference' and points deducted accordingly. Certainly a common error.

While I hated these teachers when they were doing this, I've grown to appreciate their advice. I wish more did stuff like this.

I don't remember having teachers who focused on that, and I really wish one of my coworkers had.

After a few minutes of talking to him it's very hard to figure out what he's saying because he'll have dropped nouns all together in favor of pronouns. This can get very confusing when talking about technical stuffs.

Do you mean teachers, or people in general?

Do you mean you-singular, or are you addressing everybody in the thread who used a pronoun that could have referred to teachers. I think he meant that they fed the monkeys bananas because the teachers were hungry.

Well, you could of course change the context. If we glom "We didn't give the rhinoceroces anything because they weren't ripe for a feeding, but ..." onto the front of your sentence then "ripe" starts to apply to the monkeys.

This one has given me problems so many times. Never got an answer.(I'm not a native speaker)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com