A type of ambiguity I haven't really seen before

[maradydd]

I was chatting just now with ti94 about a game for which he maintains the OS X port. He logged out abruptly in the middle of the conversation, then returned a few seconds later and said:

Tris: It aids discussion when Adium fails to crash.

Now it reads like a perfectly ordinary sentence, but at first it garden-pathed me quite nicely. I found myself looking for an external referent for "it", because I wasn't sure whether the network hiccup had been on his end or mine; if it had been on mine and he hadn't noticed, I might have missed a part of the conversation. Instead, of course, it was just heavy NP shift ("Adium failing to crash aids discussion"), but it threw me for a second.

I wonder if on some level I expect that poor network connectivity is more likely than heavy NP shift. :)