- #1
Jimmy Snyder
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A person takes the elevator to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, jumps off and freefalls all the way to the street below. He walks away uninjured. How can this be?
The first "it" in the first sentence is diamonds. The second "it" in the first sentence is diabetes. The "it" in the second sentence is poisonous mushrooms. The "it" in the third sentence, and the "answer" to the puzzle, is Barney the purple dinosaur.It's better than your favorite food, but poor people are more like to have it than rich people. If they eat it, though, they die. What is it?
Icebreaker said:It is unfair that you don't tell us everything he does, in sequence.
jimmysnyder said:How am I doing so far? I know I left out a lot of things. For instance, he lit his cigarette. But I'm certain I didn't leave out anything pertinent to the solution of the puzzle.
He jumps off the building and freefalls all the way to the street below. He walks away uninjured. How can this be?
jimmysnyder said:Some other things he did at about that time: (don't read this if you still want to solve the puzzle)
1. He took the elevator back down
jimmysnyder said:Hint. I haven't told you everything that he did
A person takes the elevator to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.Icebreaker said:You left the part where he took the elevator back down.
A person takes the elevator to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, jumps off the Empire State Building, freefalls all the way to the street below. He walks away from it uninjured. How can this be?BicycleTree said:It's not even a matter of leaving things out, it's just a grammatical error. When the man "jumps off," the word "off" is an adverbial phrase with "it" implied. i.e., he "jumps off it." In this case, "it" means "the 86th floor of the Empire state building." Saying it refers to something else is just a grammatical error, specifically a reference error.
Tough crowd. I think the puzzle is fine as originally stated. If you disagree, you have to explain how honestrosewater was able to figure it out.BicycleTree said:Now it's a good question, though the answer is now a little too obvious.
jimmysnyder said:Tough crowd. I think the puzzle is fine as originally stated. If you disagree, you have to explain how honestrosewater was able to figure it out.
Well, since the setting isn't formal, I wasn't being strict. But if you want to be strict, if you add it to get:BicycleTree said:It's not ambiguous. Any sentence of the form "I went to x and jumped off" is equivalent (just by grammar) to "I went to x and jumped off it" and is therefore equivalent to "I went to x and jumped off x."
Do you have a reference? I also wonder how that rule would handle this:BicycleTree said:The pronoun references the most recently used noun that fits it.
Hm, it seems some define adjective phrases as any phrase that modifies a noun, while others define them as phrases whose heads are adjectives- a functional vs. formal thing. I use the latter. There are probably slightly different ways of parsing sentences, but here's how I would parse just the phrases (NP = noun phrase, VP = verb phrase, etc.):The most recently used noun is "the 86th floor." "of the Empire State Building" is only an adjective phrase. It's essentially part of the other noun ("the 86th floor"), so it can't be referenced on its own. "The 86th floor of the Empire State Building" is a single noun.
That would be great! When I start seriously studying language, I'm going to try to stir up enough interest to warrant a linguistics forum. Is there enough interest already??ArielGenesis said:a language forum ?