On 2020-06-15 11:27, James Propp wrote:
Thanks, everyone, for teaching me about scoping, Empson, etc.
(Speaking of ambiguity, I just remembered that some years ago I commented on math-fun about the differing connotations of the sentences “X did not deceive Y” and “Y was not deceived by X”. Not sure if that’s an example of general species of linguistic ambiguity or just an isolated oddity.)
"X did not deceive Y" is ambiguous, by itself, as so many other English sentences are, because of different connotations of the word "deceive". It could (at least) mean: "X did not <successfully> deceive Y" or "X did not <intentionally> deceive Y". In the former X could have intended to, but was unsuccessful. In the latter X may have succeeded in deceiving Y, despite having no intention to deceive.
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