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Scholars of religion have traced the cross-pollination of modern Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the language of “experience”. (Source)

Is modern an adjective for both Hindu and buddhist traditions or only for Hindu tradition? How can one know that?

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    You can't know. At least not from the sentence itself. Only context can tell you for sure. My interpretation (based simply on what I've found to be more common in terms of language use) is that it likely applies to both things—but I could be wrong. Jun 22, 2019 at 20:13

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It's somewhat ambiguous. However, an author who is concerned about possible ambiguity will likely rearrange things to avoid the ambiguity, for example

Scholars of religion have traced the cross-pollination of Buddhist and modern Hindu traditions with the language of “experience.”

Knowing this, and noticing that the author didn't write it that way, we can conclude that probably the adjective refers to both nouns.

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