[Grammar] Which noun is complemented by phrase 'behind the fruit display"

[Andy Lin]

The whole sentence is "The customer is waiting for the clerks behind the fruit display".

I would like to know which situation this sentence is describing in grammar.

1. The customer is behind the fruit display.
2. The clerks are behind the fruit display.

 

[emsr2d2]

It's impossible to say which one the writer meant. Common sense would tell me that the writer meant your sentence #1 but your understanding #2 is still possible. To make it clear, the writer needed to use "who is/who are" in the relevant position.

1. The customer, who is behind the fruit display, is waiting for the clerks. (This could be shortened to "The customer behind the fruit display is waiting for the clerks".)
2. The customer is waiting for the clerks who are behind the fruit display. (This specifies that those are the clerks the customer is waiting for, as opposed to other clerks in the shop.)
3. The customer is waiting for the clerks, who are behind the fruit display. (This mentions only those clerks who are behind the fruit display. We don't know if there are any other clerks elsewhere in the shop.)

 

[5jj]

3. The customer is waiting for the clerks, who are behind the fruit display. (This mentions only those clerks who are behind the fruit display. We don't know if there are any other clerks elsewhere in the shop.)

I don't entirely agree. This sentence suggests to me that the speaker is referring to all the clerks.

 

[jutfrank]

This all comes down to meaning. As you've obviously understood, the structure of the sentence allows for two possible parsings, giving rise to two different meanings, which I could represent like this:

a) The customer is waiting for the clerks behind the fruit display.
b) The customer is waiting for the clerks behind the fruit display.

Is there anything in either syntactic structure itself, absent context, that contributes to one possible interpretation over another? I think another way of framing this is to ask whether there is any psycholinguistic bias in the mind towards one parsing over the other? Do we have some kind of tendency to favour simpler structures over more complex ones, for example? Or do we tend to interpret more readily those structures to which we've had greater exposure over the course of our lives?

My feeling is that there isn't any such bias, and that the initial interpretation comes from the mental picture that occurs immediately to the mind at the moment of hearing. This mental picture likely comes from our experience of and expectations about the world and how we resultingly make sense of its parts. In this case, I think the interpretation that it's the customer who is behind the desk is the more likely for the majority of people.

It's a very interesting question. I'd be very curious to know what proportion of native speakers would like me initially interpret sentence a. Perhaps we could do a little poll?