As a failed linguist (I briefly considered doing my PhD thesis on natural language), my conclusion about natural language ambiguity is: A speaker constructs an utterance for a specific audience with an assumed shared understanding. The speaker then maximizes ambiguity in order to minimize the size/length of the utterance, all consistent with the information he/she is attempting to transmit. Of course, the most skilled speakers can construct utterances that can simultaneously have different meanings for different audiences ('dog whistles'); these people are called 'politicians'. Logicians attempt to do the opposite: to construct utterances that have a universal, unambiguous meaning, regardless of size/length. This is why trying to construct unambiguous utterances makes one sound extremely pedantic -- because one has to make the obvious, obviously obvious. W.r.t. pigeon attacks: the speaker assumes that the audience already knows about pigeons and pigeon attacks; the only thing new is 'New York' and the *rate* of attacks in New York. As a truly pedantic engineer, I'm amazed that all of these pigeons have been somehow synchronized with some sort of giant clock to periodically and synchronously attack at precisely the 30-second mark. "In New York City, someone sees the sun rise every 24 hours". At 05:28 AM 6/15/2020, 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