I'm reading:

相手が動くのを待つ。

which is translated as "Wait for the opponent to move."

How do I know this sentence doesn't mean "the opponent waits to move"?

I'm guessing it has to do with the precedence (borrowing programming language
terminology) of the の?

I.e if the の binds together 動く and 待 then we get "the opponent waits to move"

but 相手が動く is evaluated first as "the opponent moves" (which is then noun-ified
to "opponent to move") then we get "wait for the opponent to move"

TL;DR - how do I determine the precedence of の in a sentence?
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2021-07-19T06:19:27.057
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2021-07-19T07:03:20.593
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question
grammar particle-の
What is the precedence of の?
Natural languages aren't like programming languages — due to ambiguity, a
given word does not have the same "precedence" or "binding strength" in all
contexts, thereby admitting multiple interpretations. Look at
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence> for examples of this.

Programming languages are constructed to avoid this type of ambiguity, so that
there's only one syntax tree for a given string of tokens. Not so for natural
language.

Context is necessary in these cases to disambiguate and identify which
interpretation is most likely.
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2021-07-19T07:03:20.593
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answer