Some Structural Ambiguities
Norman C. Stageberg · The English Journal · 1958
ANY native speakers believe that our language can be manipulated like a boy's mechanical-builder setwith its interchangeable parts that can be put together in every which fashion -and that in English one can say any old thing in any old way. Such a belief is naive, for English is structured with a large number of syntactic patterns that we are compelled to follow. As a quick example, consider this noun group: Our first large authorized class party. Each of the five modifiers belongs in a class by itself and takes its predetermined position in the pattern.' If you change the order of these modifiers in any way, you will get a nonEnglish sequence. And with many other patterns the same is true. We are pattern-bound in language just as we are culture-bound in mores. Now one