In the sentence "I want to buy the vase on the shelf which is very beautiful", which is beautiful? vase or shelf?

Question

If "which" refers to the shelf (vase), how to refer to the vase (shelf) with a similar sentence structure?

The sentence is ambiguous. This can only be established by context. Do you have more context? — jimm101, Feb 09 '23 at 02:42

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 09 '23 at 03:20

First: I'm going to assume you meant to include a comma before "which."

Normally, the antecedent of a relative clause comes immediately before it, so the interpretation would be that the shelf is beautiful. However, in context, it is very obvious that the vase is the intended antecedent, since the beauty of the vase is far more relevant to your purchasing decision.

If you wanted to make the sentence unambiguous, the simplest approach would be to remove the relative clause entirely:

I want to buy the very beautiful vase on the shelf.

Or:

I want to buy the vase on the very beautiful shelf.

From Robusto's answer at ... For sale car by elderly lady with new body ...: 'examples of syntactic ambiguity. They demonstrate ambiguity between alternate syntactic structures underlying a sentence.
The man saw the boy with the binoculars. This comment would be better under the question itself, but that's blocked at the moment. — Edwin Ashworth, Feb 09 '23 at 12:09

In the sentence "I want to buy the vase on the shelf which is very beautiful", which is beautiful? vase or shelf?

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