The following are two ambiguous sentences in syntactic studies of language. Can you disambiguate them?
(1) The chicken is too hot to eat.
(2) Flying planes can be dangerous.
Each of the sentences has two meanings. In the first sentence, the ambiguity comes from the word “chicken” which refers either to chicken meat or the domestic bird, the animal, chicken. So the sentence can either mean “The chicken meat is too hot, so it cannot be eaten at the moment” or “The chicken feels so hot that it cannot start eating and needs to calm down first.”
In the second sentence, the ambiguity comes from the phrase “flying planes”. It can be understood as “the plane that is flying” or to “fly planes”.