English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The sentence in question is the following:
Using the discovered method, the researcher can quantify the virus effectively, which is unprecedented.
The question is: is the bold clause qualifying the "quantify the virus effectively" here ? or the whole sentence (the fact that the researcher is using the discovered method to do quantification on the virus effectively) ?
If there is obvious from the context that there is no other method to quantify the virus effectively known to date, then "unprecedented" clearly refers to "quantify the virus effectively."
Even, if someone could think that "unprecedented" refers to "discovered method," the message of the sentence would remain pretty much the same.
To remove ambiguity, one could rewrite:
Using the discovered method, the researcher can quantify the virus effectively, which has not been possible, so far.
As written, and without additional context, the sentence is ambiguous. This could mean that it is unprecedented to quantify the virus effectively, or only unprecedented to do so using this specified method. Context should make it clear one way or the other.
By the way, one does not normally say that a sentence is "ambiguous to " another sentence. I am not sure exactly what was intended, so i won't edit or suggest a recasting of the title of the question.
