The sentence "The doctor phoned the nurse because he was late" can be continued in different ways depending on who "he" refers to:

**If "he" = the doctor:**
"The doctor phoned the nurse because he was late **and needed her to start prepping the patient.**"

**If "he" = the nurse:**
"The doctor phoned the nurse because he was late **and the surgery was scheduled to begin in ten minutes.**"

The sentence is actually a classic example used in linguistics and AI research to illustrate pronoun ambiguity—the word "he" could grammatically refer to either person, and context or world knowledge is needed to determine the intended meaning.
