like a man-made ocean

[suprunp]

It was a soft spring night. The breeze carried the roar of distant streets like a man-made ocean.
(H. Murakami; 1Q84)

Can I paraphrase it this way:

"The breeze carried the roar of distant streets resembling a man-made ocean."

Thanks.

[emsr2d2]

It was a soft spring night. The breeze carried the roar of distant streets like a man-made ocean.
(H. Murakami; 1Q84)

Can I paraphrase it this way:

"The breeze carried the roar of distant streets resembling a man-made ocean."

Thanks.

That's a rather odd sentence even in the original. It makes it sound as if it is the breeze doing something like a man-made ocean. It's not clear in either that it is the sound of the distant streets which sounds like a man-made ocean.

The roar of distant streets, like a man-made ocean, was carried on the breeze.

[suprunp]

Thank you, emsr2d2.

I'd thought about this 'hidden ambiguity', but decided to be directed in this case by 'the most probable meaning' rather than grammar.

Is it justifiable that the author thought something along these lines while writing the sentence in question:

[...] the more the context contributes to the communicative force of an utterance, the less need there is for the utterance to be grammatically explicit.
(A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language)

Thanks.

[5jj]

Is it justifiable that the author thought something along these lines while writing the sentence in question:

[...] the more the context contributes to the communicative force of an utterance, the less need there is for the utterance to be grammatically explicit.

That is highly unlikely, in my opinion. I think it's simply a case of 'derailed grammar'. The writer (or translator) had a couple of thoughts in his mind and ran them together clumsily.

In this particular case context does not readily contribute to the communicative force of the utterance. I had to re-read it a couple of times before I could guess what th ewriter intended to say.