These are excellent examples Dick.  I would respectfully disagree with the "unambiguous" interpretation for the last sentence.  It has three potential meanings, all stemming from the fact that the adverb 'quietly' can branch from three different verb phrases: "told", "to enter", and "was sleeping".  Punctuation could help disambiguate this though.
Great post.


Til Turner
Languages and Literature
Northern Virginia Community College


________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Dick Veit [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2014 11:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ATEG Digest - 11 Dec 2014 to 12 Dec 2014 (#2014-68)

Here's an example I used in class in support of split infinitives:


Attempts to unsplit the infinite (to quietly enter) in the following sentence don't seem to succeed:

The queen told the page to quietly enter the chamber where the king was sleeping.

Consider the possibilities:

  *   The queen told the page quietly to enter the chamber where the king was sleeping.
Misleading at best. The likely interpetation will be that the queen was speaking quietly.

  *   The queen told the page to enter quietly the chamber where the king was sleeping.
Pretty awkward. Adverbs do not usually go between verbs and their objects. Who ever says, "I entered quietly the chamber"?

  *   The queen told the page to enter the chamber quietly where the king was sleeping.
Solved a phony problem and created a real one. Now we've split a relative adverb ("where") from the noun it modifies ("the chamber").

  *   The queen told the page to enter the chamber where the king was sleeping quietly.
Not even ambiguous. This will be interpreted to mean the king wasn't snoring for a change.

Dick Veit

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