Thank you all once again for participating! (All 1,982 of you! Wow!) I love making these surveys.
(Original survey is here. Raw data is here. I have elided some survey questions from this analysis. Original Reddit post is here. Results Reddit post is here.)
Responses in the "other" category were mostly one of two types:
The sentence is ambiguous.
I think this is reasonable. In fact, originally I had considered allowing multiple choices for each sentence. However, what I really wanted was people's first and foremost reaction, so I kept it restricted to single-choice... with an Other option for those who feel strongly about the ambiguity ;-)
The sentence means that I will meet three people: Hailey, Hailey's friend, and someone else.
I think these responses come from the word meet. One can use meet to mean "to come into contact with" ("I am meeting my friend downtown") or to mean "to acquaint with for the first time" ("I am excited to meet my new classmates"). This gives the following interpretations:
Also, shout-out to the person who said that it depends on intonation. Interesting point.
Responses in the "other" category were similar to those for question #1 — many feeling that the statement is ambiguous, some feeling that it means that I will "meet" 3 people, some stating that it's definitely only two people but it's unclear which two. What I think is interesting is that for this question there are several mentions of stress — 4 people stated that the meaning depends on how "her" is emphasized, and 2 of those 4 specified that if "her" is emphasized, then "her husband" is Hailey's friend's; if her is not emphasized, then "her husband" is Hailey's husband.
Also, it's perhaps worth mentioning that the "Other" option was present on question #1 for longer than questions #2 and #3 simply because I thought I had added it to questions #2 and #3 but just hadn't.
Hehe. I included this question very deliberately. It has the exact same grammatical structure as question #1, with wildly different results. Both are of the form "I will meet with Hailey's X and Y"; with question #1, the most popular opinion is that there are two people, one of whom is X and the other whom is Y, but with question #2, the most popular opinion is that there is only one person, who is both X and Y.
I think this is not a surprising result, but I do find it interesting. I think it's easy to think that grammar of can be analyzed without care for a sentence's content, i.e., the only thing that matter grammatically about the word red is that it's an adjective. However, this gives an example where the content of a sentence affects how it is grammatically interpreted.