Ambiguous Sentence

can't figure it out wrote:

I've been staring at this sentence for 20 minutes and I can't figure out how it's ambiguous. Help a fellow letsrunner out.

The old man found his wallet near the bank.

The possessive marker "his" is ambiguous. Since this sentence could appear in a paragraph, detailing a story-world with many people, we don't know who "him" is... It could be the old man or it could be someone else. Many languages similar to English have this ambiguity, because both the old man, here, discussed in the omniscient narrated third person, and any possible other character in that story-world, all are spoken of in the third person and the possessive in this case and in other languages could be third person.

He might have swum across the river and dropped his wallet near the bank, too.

Also, in this day and age, it might not really be a man, but a woman who identifies as a man.

Crap. I didn't think of that. But the problem is that I'm supposed to be focusing on how syntactic trees would differ for each case. Would it really yield two different ones? I'm still struggling with how that would work. It's still just a possessive pronoun in both, no?

The prepositional phrase "near the bank" could be diagrammed a couple ways. It could modify the verb which is the normal way of interpreting it, describing where the man was doing the finding. It could also modify "wallet," in order to distinguish between his other wallets, like his wallet in the tree and his wallet in the kitchen. That is a stretch but it would result in a different diagram.

Bad Wigins wrote:

He might have swum across the river and dropped his wallet near the bank, too.

[...]

Accra wrote:

The prepositional phrase "near the bank" could be diagrammed a couple ways. It could modify the verb which is the normal way of interpreting it, describing where the man was doing the finding. It could also modify "wallet," in order to distinguish between his other wallets, like his wallet in the tree and his wallet in the kitchen. That is a stretch but it would result in a different diagram.

Fantastic! I knew I was missing some things, but I was too lazy to work at it. There are my SAT verbal champions, oh yea.

Accra wrote:

The prepositional phrase "near the bank" could be diagrammed a couple ways. It could modify the verb which is the normal way of interpreting it, describing where the man was doing the finding. It could also modify "wallet," in order to distinguish between his other wallets, like his wallet in the tree and his wallet in the kitchen. That is a stretch but it would result in a different diagram.

My wallet near the bank never has much money compared to the wallet in my pocket. I can see why the old man dropped his.