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A dangling modifier (also known as a dangling participle, illogical participle or hanging participle) is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. [1] A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle.
to a motion she made (the verb "duck", the subject of which is the objective pronoun "her", object of the verb "saw"). [ 5 ] Syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can have two (or more) different meanings because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax.
At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to reparse it, with "fruit flies" as the subject and "like" as the main verb. The first sentence predisposes the reader towards the incorrect parsing of the second. After reparsing the second, it becomes clear that the first sentence could be re-parsed in the same way.
In computer science, an ambiguous grammar is a context-free grammar for which there exists a string that can have more than one leftmost derivation or parse tree. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Every non-empty context-free language admits an ambiguous grammar by introducing e.g. a duplicate rule.
When ambiguous nouns appear, they can function as both the object of the first item or the subject of the second item. In that case, the former use is preferred. It is also found that the reanalysis of a garden-path sentence gets more and more difficult with the length of the ambiguous phrase. [13]
The dangling else is a problem in programming of parser generators in which an optional else clause in an if–then(–else) statement can make nested conditional statements ambiguous. Formally, the reference context-free grammar of the language is ambiguous , meaning there is more than one correct parse tree .