Comments on: What are you on about now? (Prepositions: on vs about) http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-vs-about/ The English Language & Usage Stack Exchange Blog Fri, 04 Nov 2016 17:12:43 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.6 By: Alan http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-vs-about/#comment-30 Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:39:02 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=47#comment-30 (Sorry the first sentence got chopped.) It should read:

The ambiguity in “I attended a lecture on Mars” is not an ambiguity in the meaning of ‘on’ but an ambiguity in the placement of the prepositional phrase (PP): …

]]> By: Alan http://english.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/on-vs-about/#comment-29 Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:24:20 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=47#comment-29 The ambiguity in “I attended a lecture on Mars” is not an ambiguity in the meaning of ‘on’ in the placement of the prepositional phrase (PP): if the lecture takes place on Mars, the PP is modifying the Verb Phrase “attend a lecture”; if the lecture is about Mars, the PP is modifying the noun “lecture”. This is the same ambiguity as in the famous Groucho Marx joke: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How it got into my pyjamas, I have no idea.”

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