[hossein18]

 
Dear firends
Dr. MacCawaly's in his ''Everything that Linguists....'' claims that the following sentence is ambiguous and gives  two meanings for that. The sentence doesn’t seem to me ambiguous and the two meanings is also the same for me:
'' Many Politicians admire most crooks, it can mean either (i)that the number of politicians who admire most crooks is large, or(ii) that the crook whom many politicians admire are a majority of all crooks''
Could you please base on the domain of quantifiers explain the ambiguity
Regards
 
Hossein

[Hossein Kassaie]

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[M. Shadmani]

Both of them are seems to be correct!

But the first one seems to be correct in my point of view. Because at the second sentence the word "majority" makes it difference. We can not exactly say that they are pertaining to or characterized by a majority.

So the first one seems to be accurate

[majkull]

The source of ambiguity is the fact that there are two independent quantifiers within this sentence. Each of them refers to a different word.