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A student disrespecting his teacher hurts us.

What is the meaning of the sentence?

Is it 'the act of disrespecting teachers by a student hurts us?

Now my question is how is the sentence formed? Why did we use participle to describe the act? Use use participle to describe the word it's placed after (here student). It should mean 'the student hurt us'. But the meaning is something different.

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The subject is "A student disrespecting his teacher". The meaning of this participle construction and so the meaning is pragmatically understood.

If you consider the headword to be "student", you get a sentence whose meaning is surprising: that the "student hurt us". Alternatively you can treat the participle as the headword, with "the student" being the subject of the participle. And that results in the expecting meaning "disrepecting hurts us"

So ones brain naturally picks the second meaning

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  • +1 Nice explanation! It seems like the second version could be made more explicit by changing to the gerund construction "A student's disrespecting his teacher hurts us," but for some reason that sounds really awkward (at least to me). I wonder why the original version with the ambiguous meaning sounds so much better than this alternative?
    – Quack E. Duck
    Commented Jun 22, 2023 at 4:34

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