The most beautiful theory for dealing with such quantifier scope ambiguities in natural language is "Montague Grammar" originated by Richard Montague in the early 1970s and developed in various ways since. The approach uses generalized quantifiers to provide rigorous, compositionally constucted mappings between sentences of natural language and models in intensional logic. For a summary, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montague-semantics/ George http://georgehart.com On 6/15/2020 8:28 AM, James Propp 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 _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun