Anyone who has struggled with learning a language rich in morphology (prefixes, suffixes, verbal inflections, gender together with agreement phenomena, etc.), such as Latin or Russian, may sigh for the apparent stripped-down simplicity of English words. But such grammatical markers, properly used, relieve the interpretive burden on the listener. English, with its complex and barely-statable maneuvers of movement and ellipsis, presents the ESL student with thorny complexities of interpretation and resolution of ambiguities, mostly without the morphological agreement-rules that help the reader or listener figure out what goes with what.
A linguistic colleague I used to work with had a slogan affixed above his desk,
(A) “I like ambiguity more than most people.”
The witticism consists in the fact that that sentence is itself ambiguous.
(1) On the first reading, it means “I am unusually fond of ambiguity”. A slight rewording would force that reading:
“I like ambiguity more than most people do.”
Or again, stylistically diffferent:
“I like ambiguity more than do most people.”
For the learner of English, even that clarified version can present diffficulties -- how to interpret those floating grammatical monads, “do”. In an inflected language, the case-endings would do that work: in (A), “most people” is the subject of a gapped subordinate clause, and would be marked with the nominative case. But English lacks that resource, except among (some of) the personal pronouns.
(2) On the second reading, the slogan means “I like ambiguity; by comparison, I find most people somewhat lacking.”
Again, that reading can be forced by a minimal rewording:
“ I like ambiguity more than I do most people.”
On this
reading, in (A), “most people” is a direct object, and would, in an inflected
language, be marked with the accusative case.
(A completely different disambiguator, not available in unitalicized written form, can make use of contrastive stress: “most people” for (1), “most people” for (2).)
The barb within the witticism consists in the fact that the first reading is -- in the written form of the slogan -- more accessible to the reader -- it is the first thing people will think: and for the average person, his cognitive efffort will end right there; he does not perceive the ambiguity.
*
This morning, on the eve of the fraught midterms, candidate Abdul El-Sayed stubbornly brushed-aside various objections from detractors, saying he is sticking with the central principle of his candidacy:
(B) “I want to get money out of politics.”
That is to say, he wishes to rid politics of influence from the ultrarich.
But there is another possible reading of (B), meaning “The reason I entered politics is to enrich myself (to get money).” On that reading, the slogan could serve equally well as the guiding principle of … Jared Kushner.
