Interesting Observations Come With Ambiguity
In an email to the Leonardo mailing list, I almost said:
If I use Kid, I'll ship Leonardo with it.
but then was worried that would be interpreted the wrong way around. So I considered saying:
If I use Kid, I'll ship it with Leonardo.
but was still worried that it would be interpreted the wrong way around.
A similar incident happened a few weeks ago when I was talking to my colleague James Marcus about whether he had the right A to use with B. I said:
I'm sure A comes with B.
and he looked confused. I realised he thought I was suggesting that A includes B (rather than the other way around)
Sentences of the form:
- A ships with B; or
- A comes with B
are strange in that the relationship between A and B is clearly not symmetrical and yet, for me at least, A and B are often syntactically interchangeable.
Even if I clearly intend to express that A includes B, either of the following in most cases conveys that to me:
- A comes with B
- B comes with A
I wonder if there are other phrasal verbs in English that have clearly distinct grammatical roles but ambiguous syntactic position.
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Last Modified: July 8, 2005
Author: James Tauber