a. You were wrong to go there.
b. What you said was wrong.
c. What you did was wrong.
'Wrong' is a an ambiguous word. It could mean 'morally wrong' or simply 'incorrect'.
My feeling is that in (a) and (b) it has the 'incorrect' meaning. It means you made a mistake. It doesn't mean you did something immoral.
In (b) it has the moral meaning. It means what you did was morally wrong.
Is that correct?
Many thanks.
wrong
Re: wrong
Not necessarily. As is so often the case with this kind of question, the answer is highly context-dependent. In the case of a), a schoolboy might have been caught in the teachers' staff room just before an exam, reading the answers. In the case of b), a bullying supervisor could be being disciplined after being caught swearing at a subordinate on CCTV. In both cases, a moral infraction would have occurred, not a mere error.
So in practice, speech ambiguities are often resolved by the setting. In actual conversation, a lot of disambiguating information is also conveyed by the tone of voice, speech volume, rate of delivery, timbre etc.
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