What is the precedence of の?

Question

I'm reading:

相手が動くのを待つ。

which is translated as "Wait for the opponent to move."

How do I know this sentence doesn't mean "the opponent waits to move"?

I'm guessing it has to do with the precedence (borrowing programming language terminology) of the の?

I.e if the の binds together 動く and 待 then we get "the opponent waits to move"

but 相手が動く is evaluated first as "the opponent moves" (which is then noun-ified to "opponent to move") then we get "wait for the opponent to move"

TL;DR - how do I determine the precedence of の in a sentence?

This questions is about whether 相手が marks the subject of the main clause (待つ being the verb) or the subordinate clause (動く being the verb), and it is basically asking the same thing as How to know where a quote ends? except that one was about the quotative と. It depends on the context. — aguijonazo, Jul 19 '21 at 06:56
You may be interested in this question: Are Japanese modifiers “greedy”, “anti-greedy”, or do they mean whatever people choose them to mean? Technically speaking, this sentence is ambiguous, but I think the simpler interpretation (相手 is the subject of 動く) is the right one in more than 99% of the time. After all, they are next to each other. — naruto, Jul 21 '21 at 11:52

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 19 '21 at 07:03

Natural languages aren't like programming languages — due to ambiguity, a given word does not have the same "precedence" or "binding strength" in all contexts, thereby admitting multiple interpretations. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence for examples of this.

Programming languages are constructed to avoid this type of ambiguity, so that there's only one syntax tree for a given string of tokens. Not so for natural language.

Context is necessary in these cases to disambiguate and identify which interpretation is most likely.

What is the precedence of の?

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