Negation/punctuation

Short of translating these into Spanish, or into some other language where some grammatical machinery such as the subjunctive can save us from the ambiguity, we'll have to resign ourselves to the fact that the subject sentence is just plain ambiguous.

Cleft sentences can sometimes save the day on these:

It was not because he was rich that she liked him.
It was because he was rich that she disliked him.

But to cut to the chase, I take (2) as the meaning if no other clues are available.

CJ

Hello Teachers

Thank you for your replies.

It seems a comma plays an important role in determining the scope of negation.
I should be careful in using a comma when making a complex sentence.

paco

Hello Amandine

Thank you for the information. It's really helpful. Yes, I agree we had better front an adverbial clause, especially in speaking, to avoid the ambiguity of negation scope; "Because he was rich, she didn't like him" rather than "She didn't like him because he was rich." But I often come across to sentences written in a way like "She didn't like him, because he was rich". I think this way of writing is not so bad if a comma inserted between two clauses, because I feel people might often put an adverbial clause after the main clause as an additional information/thought. I am wondering if I were wrong.

paco

Hello Khoff

I agree. We can parse "She didn't like him because he was rich" as "She NOT [(liked) (him) (because he was rich)]". Here three elements are candidates to be negated. When we specify the negation to (liked), i.e., "NOT (liked)", we have to use "disliked" for "NOT (liked)".

paco