 It will be objected that this response makes the verb “ate” ambiguous in an implausible way (Oliver and Smiley 2001). For when the verb has a direct object that is singular, it will presumably be interpreted by means of the ordinary relation x ate y. But there is fairly strong evidence that the verb “ate” isn’t ambiguous in this way. For instance, one effect of an ambiguity is to disallow certain kinds of ellipsis. An example is the ambiguity of “make” in “make breakfast” and “make a plan”, which disallows the following ellipsis: