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How can I convey the inherent quality of being beautiful of a girl and the fact that she is a dancer?

  1. To be sure: The sentence "She's a beautiful dancer" cannot be interpreted otherwise, right? Just like "a small businessman" does not refer to the inherent smallness of the person but refers to the size of his enterprise.

  2. To answer the first question: Would it be something ungainly like: She is a dancer and is beautiful.?

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    The dancer is a beautiful girl. That beautiful girl is a dancer. – Weather Vane Sep 13 '22 at 17:43
  • I would say that "She's a beautiful dancer" does usually mean that she dances beautifully. She might be ugly as sin and still be a beautiful dancer. – Andrew Leach Sep 13 '22 at 17:59
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    ... OP is saying that the adjective/noun collocation is normally taken as non-intersective. See here ('heavy smoker'). // 'She dances beautifully' works for the unwanted sense. But 'her' being beautiful and 'her' being a dancer are hardly closely connected, so why should one expect not to have to essentially make two statements? Two sentences might be the better option, in fact. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 13 '22 at 18:03
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    She’s beautiful and a dancer. – Jim Sep 13 '22 at 20:28

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Yes, "she's a beautiful dancer" would normally be interpreted to mean she dances well, just like a "small businessman" is normally interpreted to mean he owns a small business. There's enough ambiguity in the construction that it could theoretically be interpreted the other way around, though, so that's the source of a common form of joke -- "He's a small businessman; he's only four feet tall" is funny because it forces you to go back and reinterpret the first phrase.

The ambiguity happens because "beautiful" is a word that can apply to either a person or a performance, and in generally we read it as referring forward to the next noun rather than backward to the subeject of the sentence.

One thing you can do to fix this is to add an additional descriptor between beautiful and dancer that makes it clear that you're listing out aspects of the woman rather than describing the nature of her dance: "She's a beautiful blonde dancer" unambiguously means she's pretty, not that she dances especially well. (Similarly, "he's a small, fat, balding businessman" no longer seems to have anything to do with what kind of business he runs.)

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