| I still think you're missing my point, although I am impressed by your German skills ("der Schimmel" is BTW just a homonym, it's hardly related to the topic of syntactic ambiguity). > is a) another joke sentence nobody uses in practice, and b) is exactly a case where you can only distinguish the part of speech (and the grammatical case) of a word from the syntactic structure and not from its morphology, something you claimed doesn't happen in German, but here it clearly does. I didn't make such a strong claim. All I wanted to say in German syntactic ambiguities are much less of a problem than in English. I've brought two anecdotal evidences to let you compare possible ambiguities in both of them, these two are indeed nothing but jokes. But let's take a closer look at them once again. a) "Time flies like an arrow": the word "time" can be 1) a noun 2) an adjective 3) a verb in declarative form 4) a verb in imperative form. This gives us a factor of 4 on the very first word of the sentence. b) "Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen" - ambiguitity exists just between "fliegen" as a verb and "Fliegen" as a plural noun, thus the "ambiguity factor" of the word "f/Fliegen" is just 2. > but I would need to see some good data before I believed that claim, because it's just not something that is immediately obvious. Fair enough. |