Editing Syntactic ambiguity (section)

==In humour and advertising==

Syntactic or structural ambiguities are frequently found in humour and advertising. One enduring joke using an ambiguous modifier is a quip spoken by [[Groucho Marx]] in the 1930 film [[Animal Crackers (1930 film)|''Animal Crackers'']]: "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I don't know." Another sentence, which emerged from early 1960s machine translation research, is "[[Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana]]".
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More than one movie has used the comic line "The peasants are revolting", which allows an interpretation of ''revolting'' as both a verb or adjective{{citation needed|date=January 2022}}. In the realm of advertising and marketing, one of the enduring advertisements for [[The Glad Products Company|Glad garbage bags]] states "Don't Get Mad. Get Glad." In this advertisement the phrase "Get Glad" could be interpreted as having a linking verb followed by an adjective (e.g. ''"Become happy"'') or as having a transitive verb followed by a noun direct object (e.g. ''"Buy Glad garbage bags"'').
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Significantly enough, structural ambiguities may also be intentionally created when one understands the kinds of syntactic structures that will lead to ambiguity; however, for the respective interpretations to work, they must be compatible with semantic and pragmatic contextual factors.<ref name="Dallin">{{cite book|last=Oaks |first=Dallin D. |title=Structural Ambiguity in English: An Applied Grammatical Inventory |volume=2 vols. |publisher=Continuum |location=London |date=2010|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=F3E8CwAAQBAJ|isbn=9781441141378 }}</ref>