Jim, I just had a Zoom meeting with a physicist who has undertaken the project of implementing enough linguistics on a computer in order to have a conversation about chess. His program is now able to “understand” about the first half of “Bobby Fisher teaches chess.” As you can imagine, chess sentences often have several quantifiers. The linguistic term that covers quantifiers is “scoping” and he recommends Steedman and Isard, "Taking Scope: The Natural Semantics of Quantifiers" (The MIT Press) Not directly related, but here are two fine examples showing how even parts of speech can be ambiguous: “Time flies like an arrow” “Fruit flies like a banana” -Veit
On Jun 15, 2020, at 8:28 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Math gives us one way to dissect the ambiguity of sentences like “In New York City, someone is attacked by a pigeon every thirty seconds” (is it always the same person? is it always the same pigeon?) by way of quantifiers. Does linguistics have its own way of talking about the different interpretations of such a sentence?
Jim