I'm not a native English speaker and when I read the following sentence (which is taken from a roleplaying manual) I find it to be very confusing because of two possible meanings.
Any "shaken" opponent hit by you is "flat-footed" to your attacks.
This is not exactly the original text: I've removed complicated concepts specific to the game like when the attack should be done or how long the flat-footed condition lasts and I've replaced a list of possible conditions with shaken – I want to ask about the structure of the sentence, not the game (I already have asked about it at RPG.SE and I discovered mt problem is not in the rules but in the language).
It's also very important to understand that shaken and flat-footed are different conditions in the game.
So, I initially read that as
"Any opponent that is shaken and I have hit is now flat-footed"
(While the opponent I have hit is shaken, it's also flat-footed)
The vast majority of people reads that as
"Any opponent you hit while it was shaken"
(If I have hit the hopponent while it was shaken, now it's flat-footed)
…and I see that their option is valid too.
I think it's a sentence parsing problem with the two options being equivalent to:
- Any shaken opponent hit by you is flat-footed to your attacks.
- Any shaken opponent hit by you is flat-footed to your attacks.
Where the subject of the sentence is bolded
Someone also tells me my interpretation is not a viable choice or not how it works, and I'd like to know if they are right.
Is my vision plain wrong because of some English sentence structure rule I'm not aware of?
Best Answer
No. English sentences are often ambiguous. But you might still be wrong for other reasons.
Let me try to rephrase the two interpretations:
One of these interpretations probably makes more sense within the internal logic of the game. If so, the "vast majority of people" you've spoken to might not have even noticed the ambiguity because they read it with what was to them the obvious interpretation. To resolve the ambiguity, I think you have to look at the context, both the surrounding rules and the text explaining the motivation behind them. Ask yourself: Does being in the "shaken" condition cause other effects similar to interpretation 1? Does having been previously hit by you cause effects similar to interpretation 2?
Speaking of context, I wonder if there are lots of rules governing the transitions in and out of these conditions or states of being. Perhaps the manual spelled out the first transition rule in great detail, and expected you fill in the details (by analogy) on subsequent, tersely-stated rules.