Does "I saw a blue car and bus" mean "blue bus" or any coloured bus?

Question

What is the outcome of any and every sentence in the following sentence format when the rules of English grammar is applied upon them.

sentence format <Noun Verb Determiner Adjective Noun Conjunction Noun.

Will the sentence in the said sentence format be interpreted as <Noun Verb Determiner Adjective (Noun Conjunction Noun)> or will it be interpreted as <Noun Verb Determiner (Adjective Noun) Conjunction Noun> ?

For example: - Does this sentence "I saw a blue car and bus" mean "blue bus" or any coloured bus ?

Tks

Answer 1

As commented, OP's example is a bit "weird". But here are two different versions of a common assertion that manifests the same potential ambiguity, showing how native Anglophones resolve that ambiguity...

1: I have a younger brother and sister
(very strongly implies my brother and sister are both younger than me)
2: I have a younger brother and a sister ¹
(strongly implies only my brother is younger)

...and for completeness...
3: I have a sister and younger brother
4: I have a sister and a younger brother
...both of which mean the same as #2 (only the brother is younger)

It's important to note that if the adjective modifies only one noun, we normally specify the "unmodified" noun first, so #2 isn't actually very common anyway...

As this usage chart shows, references to siblings who are both younger far outweigh references explicitly stating that only one sibling is younger. That's why I didn't include #1 in the chart (comparatively speaking, all other versions would just "flatline" on the chart).

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¹ The effect of repeating the article here is to place more "syntactic distance" between the two nouns, which therefore makes it less likely that we would extend the scope of the adjective to apply to both. Exactly the same effect arises if we include a comma / pause before and. Either or both of these "distancing" methods can be used to override the default assumption that the scope of the adjective does "run through" to the second noun.

Answer 2

It means "a blue bus". After "and" you can omit repeated words. In this way:

• I saw a car and (a) bus
• I saw a blue car and (a blue) bus

Answer 3

I've read through the responses, and I see a lack of agreement of responses, so I'll speak to my experience as a native speaker with some insight into language. First, the idea that the construction is not grammatical is clearly wrong. The question of whether something is frequently said, sometimes referred to as idiomatic, and whether it violates grammar are two different things. A related example of this is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Because the question of whether or not the bus is blue is vague, does not make it non-grammatical. It makes it semantically ambiguous.

Secondly, "I saw a car and a bus" can certainly be shortened to "I saw a car and bus" with an implication that the indefinite article "a" carries over to the bus meaning "I saw a pair of things: car and bus". But the caveat is that it is only an implication and therefore it is vague. Vagueness in language is a feature by which the tokens of a language can have multiple senses and require disambiguation.

"I saw a blue car and bus" today to my ear as a native speaker suggests "I saw a pair of things: a blue car and blue bus", but some less competent native speakers might violate an important rule by using the sentence and not meaning that the bus was also blue. So, in a court of law, for instance, any attorney isn't going to let the vagueness stand, and would ask follow up questions to avoid confusion.

There are some rules that speakers use that it is best to be familiar with that are known collectively in the philosophy of language as obeying the cooperative principle.

The maxim of quantity would be violated by saying "A blue car and a blue bus" because shorter is better. Thus "A blue car and bus" doesn't waste any time. The maxim of manner or clarity is violated by "A blue car and bus" and so "A blue car and a blue bus" is better. So what does a speaker do when two principles intuitively clash? They rely on the context of the conversation. Which means they're both right depending on how they play a role in part of the larger conversation. Children and jokes often playfully exploit this sort of vagueness.

Thus, both are grammatical AND idiomatic under the right situation. Unless you provide additional context, it's difficult to advise.

Answer 4

I'm fairly confident in saying that your example sentence:

"I saw a blue car and bus"

is not grammatically correct English, and also not something a native speaker would ever normally utter.*

English requires articles before nouns (except when it doesn't, but let's not dive into that rabbit hole right now). And a fluent English speaker would insert one before "bus", unless they were either:

1. referring to some single thing named "car-and-bus", or
2. trying to use the word "bus" as something other than a singular countable common noun.**

So it's not surprising that you're getting contradictory answers on how different people understand this broken sentence, since it all depends on how they try to mentally correct it.

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Anyway, inserting the missing article, the corrected sentence "I saw a blue car and a bus" strictly speaking only says that the car was blue, without implying anything about the color of the bus. It could of course also be blue, but it doesn't have to be.

That said, in a suitable context, I could see it carrying a suggestion that the bus was blue, too. For example, imagine a child playing a game where they have to spot as many different blue things as they can during a trip, and later being asked by their parent if they saw any, and answering:

"Yes I did! I saw a blue car and a bus and a mailbox and a traffic sign and flowers and a balloon and…"

The speaker certainly could have repeated the word "blue" before each item in the list, but they chose not to (and the parent listening to them was probably thankful for it). But the contextual implication that this is a list of blue things is still there, even if only the first item is explicitly described as being blue.

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*) Those are not the same thing, at least not unless you want to be an ultra-descriptivist and basically define something to be "grammatically correct" if and only if it's idiomatic for native speakers of the language to say. While I tend to be a descriptivist myself, I wouldn't go quite that far: even if a grammar, to me, is essentially an attempt to formalize how speakers of a language actually communicate, I'm still willing to grant such formal descriptions an existence and validity separate from the vague and nebulous thing that they try to describe.

**) A second verb could come naturally after "and", but "bus" can't really be parsed as a verb here, since it doesn't look like a regular past tense English verb ending in "-ed" and doesn't match any common verb with an irregular past tense either. Of course there are other possible interpretations too, like "Bus" maybe being somebody's (kind of weird) name, but those get increasingly outlandish and unlikely.

Answer 5

I'm adding another answer, as all the other answers completely miss the point of this question.

OP,

Ambiguity has no connection, at all - utterly no connection - in any way - whatsoever - to grammar.

It's that simple. End of story.

• An utterance which is perfectly grammatically correct, can be completely ambiguous.

• An utterance which has grammatical errors, can be completely ambiguous.

• An utterance which is perfectly grammatically correct, can be unambiguous.

• An utterance which has grammatical errors, can be unambiguous.

Grammar has simply no connection at all, in any way to ambiguity - just as it obviously has no connection to content.

Note that similarly grammar has, obviously, no connection to content.

Say I said "Radio signals work by using fairy dust." If you then asked "what's wrong with that sentence grammatically" you would be completely misguided.

Over and over on this site, questions are asked about the grammar of ambiguous sentences. This is simply misguided.

I think it's worth noting that answers which fail to immediately and conclusively point out that grammar has nothing to do with ambiguity, really confuse the OP. Unfortunately this confusion happens over and over, almost daily, on this site.

Answer 6

The structure of the sentence suggests to me that the car and the bus are a set in some way. Otherwise I would expect to expand it to “I saw a blue car and I saw bus”, which makes no sense. As a blue set, both the car and the bus would be blue.

Answer 7

On its own, it does not imply that the bus is blue. But it probably is, because if the colour of the bus isn't blue you would probably mention that fact.

But in natural contexts, the listener might infer or understand that the bus was also blue. You would need to know why the person was talking about cars and buses; what question were they answering?

What colours of vehicles did you see today?

I saw a blue car and bus.

In this conversation (about colour) I'd infer that the bus was also blue.

On the other hand, suppose I said "I ate spicy chicken and chips". I'd probably assume that "spicy" only applies to the chicken.

In particular cases, you would assume that the adjective applies to both, or only to one. But you can't generalise this to a universal rule.

Answer 8

I'm a non-English speaker who has immersed himself in this language for over 20 years. To me, this sentence should read as: I saw a blue car and a bus. And, with or without "a", I would understand the person saw a blue car, but not necessarily a [blue] bus; the bus can come in any color. And if an officer asked me what I saw, I'd say I saw a car and a bus, which were both blue.