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From: anw%maths.nottingham.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK ("A. N. Walker")
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Re: ambiguous sentences
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Date: Tue, 11-Mar-86 18:23:24 EST
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Posted: Tue Mar 11 18:23:24 1986
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	English is supposed to be right associative, so "pretty little
girls school" is (relatively) unambiguously a pretty schoolette for
girls.  Similarly, "second hand book shop" should probably be as opposed
to a third automatic drug store.  The other possible associations should
be obtained by hyphenation or concatenation, as "second handbook shop",
"second-hand book shop" or [the usual meaning] "secondhand-book shop".
Sadly, English has no good way of writing a third-level bracket, so
more complicated examples can be very hard to write down.

	Andy Walker,
	Maths Dept, Nottingham Univ., UK.