Well, to me in “the gift we give tomorrow”, “tomorrow” answers to “when do we give it ?” not “to whom do we give it ?”. But that may be because I’m not a native English speaker, in English the “to” is indeed not mandatory, so the sentence could technically mean both. In French the “to” (well “à”) is mandatory, so my french-wired brain probably stops scanning once it found a way to interpret the sentence in a french-friendly way. Unless directly asked “could there be a second meaning ?” and then it’ll dig further into non-frenchy ways. That’s the way I feel it at least...
But IMHO, better use a sentence that can only be understood one way, when possible, especially when trying to convey a very strong meaning.
In some cases, where you have multiple words with the same meaning, it can be more poetically powerful to choose the ambiguous meaning. The best choice is going to very from culture to culture.
Well, to me in “the gift we give tomorrow”, “tomorrow” answers to “when do we give it ?” not “to whom do we give it ?”. But that may be because I’m not a native English speaker, in English the “to” is indeed not mandatory, so the sentence could technically mean both. In French the “to” (well “à”) is mandatory, so my french-wired brain probably stops scanning once it found a way to interpret the sentence in a french-friendly way. Unless directly asked “could there be a second meaning ?” and then it’ll dig further into non-frenchy ways. That’s the way I feel it at least...
But IMHO, better use a sentence that can only be understood one way, when possible, especially when trying to convey a very strong meaning.
In some cases, where you have multiple words with the same meaning, it can be more poetically powerful to choose the ambiguous meaning. The best choice is going to very from culture to culture.