Timeline for How to use the word 'unexpectedly'?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Jul 13, 2021 at 5:03 | comment | added | gotube♦ | I was agreeing with your answer, in which you said "If you want to specify ... you have to explicitly say so." I understand that to mean the sentence is ambiguous otherwise. If there's no comma and it applies to the whole clause, it's still ambiguous to me in terms of who is surprised. It could even be a third party observer who's surprised even though neither of the people in the sentence were surprised. | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 4:54 | comment | added | JavaLatte | @gotube In spoken English, we can place the stress on what specifically is unexpected and add a pause before the adverb, for example, "I spoke to her, unexpectedly" vs "I spoke to her, unexpectedly": In written English, we can use adverb placement to be specific: "I, unexpectedly, spoke to her" vs "I spoke: to her, unexpectedly".. As I said, it means that any reasonable person could not have expected something. It's not ambiguous at all. | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 2:09 | comment | added | gotube♦ | Yep, in other words, what specifically is unexpected, and for whom it is unexpected is ambiguous. | |
| Jul 13, 2021 at 1:42 | history | answered | JavaLatte | CC BY-SA 4.0 |