Syntax with Sherlock - Sentence Ambiguity Illustrated and Diagrammed

*For simplicity's sake, because the phrase "using binoculars" functions like a prepositional phrase, I have taken the liberty of changing "using" to "with" for the diagrams.

Here is a syntactic diagram of the version of the sentence pictured on the left.

Here is a syntactic diagram of the version of the sentence pictured on the right.




The above syntactic trees show that the ambiguous nature of the sentence results from the possibility of the prepositional phrase attaching to the noun phrase or directly to the verb phrase.

Click here for more sentence ambiguity diagrams.

Sherlock image from - http://bb.ustc.edu.cn/