flying planes can be dangerous

As anyone with family knows, visiting relatives can be fun.

As anyone who's ever dabbled in linguistics knows, that sentence is syntactically ambiguous. Either I'm on a visit to spend time with my relatives, or my relatives are paying me a visit, and you don't know which unless there's more information in the context.

It's similar to the other textbook examples of the same thing:

• Flying planes can be dangerous.

• Changing schedules can cause confusion.

• The shooting of the hunters is deplorable.

Anyway, the point is, blogging output is limited at the moment due to the fact that, unambiguously, I've got family staying. Back later.