In the song あの夢をなぞって (Ano Yume o Nazotte), the third line is

> 音の無い二人だけの世界で聞こえた言葉は「好きだよ」.

The translations to English give this as some variation of

> In that soundless world with only two of us, the words I heard were "I like
> you"

Which parses the sentence like: (音の無い) (二人だけの世界), which I completely agree
with. However, (音の無い二人)だけの世界 also seems possible to me.

The main question is: is there a concrete grammatical reason why 二人だけの世界 is
modified as a whole unit, if so what is it?

I also wonder could one rewrite it so that 音の無い naturally applies to just 二人
in stead of the entire phrase?

So far, my thoughts on the subject:

  * Is there some precedence given to the possessive の, for example _you tend to (or must?) group things with の before applying adjectives_ ?
  * 二人だけの世界 is a relatively common "set phrase" and it feels unnatural to me to break it up in this way. Could that be the only reason? Is that even a valid reason?
  * Is the particle だけ somehow responsible?
  * According to [this answer](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/46819), as well as other people I've heard online, Japanese modifiers _tend_ to modify "As little as possible" and "As close as possible" which in this case appears contrary to the actual sentence.
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2021-11-21T02:29:06.907
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question
syntax relative-clauses ambiguity modification
How to tell which noun is being modified in 二人だけの世界
Regarding the particular phrase, simply because '音の無い二人' does not make sense
(as an ordinary Japanese phrase) and '音のない世界' is quite natural, '(音の無い)
(二人だけの世界)' is the only possibility.

Generally there remain ambiguities on which adjective (etc) modifies which
nouns. A famous example is '黒い目のきれいな女の子'. There are many possible readings for
this (18 ways attributed to Hisashi Inoue, a famous writer, by [this
page](https://researchmap.jp/blogs/blog_entries/view/86185/ed261373560a263bd99ad001894f369c?frame_id=415042)).
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answer