ambiguity, scope

[Jaskin]

Hi,

I'm not trying to infer anything here. I should go back to my initial question. I didn't see the ambiguity in the first example, that's why I asked. If the sentence though unnatural sounding is ambiguous then by the same token I tried to construct different examples that would have the same structure, hence should post similar ambiguity. I'm aware there are the limits and it's what I'm trying to test.

Cheers,
Ps how did you do the quantifiers in post #12 ? LaTeX code ?

 

[Barb_D]

One of the sentences we had to parse in my linguistics class was "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."

(The phrase "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee" is an advertising slogan.)

That has the same type of ambiguity.
Do we share a dislike of the same "something" or for each of us, is there our own personal "something"?

 

[MikeNewYork]

Sorry, I don't do Polish. Your determiners/articles added to the meaning. If you want to strip them away, we will go backwards instead of forwards.

 

[MikeNewYork]

In every day life the ambiguity is ruled out by context alone or situation of an utterance.
Let's take: (I'll replace the 'some' to perhaps more natural sounding 'there is ')
There is chocolate for all of you.
There is chocolate for each of you.
There is chocolate for every one of you.
I think the first is the most ambiguous in the same way or in the same sense as the unfortunate example with cat. The last one I find to be the least ambiguous.
How to disambiguate such statement in natural language ? Is there any good literature on that ?

Cheers

I don't see any problem with your chocolate sentences. They are not the same as the cat sentences. In your sentences, everyone could have chocolate.

 

[Jaskin]

Hi,

In one of my posts I wrote:
Yet my seems to not very well developed language intuition is telling me that the two sentences would have different 'gut','first' interpretation.
Some cat is feared by every mouse. <=> There exists a cat which is feared by every mouse.
Every mouse is afraid of some cat. <=> For every mouse, there is some cat that the mouse fears.


Let's some cat be x; and every mouse y; Fxy - x feared by y; Fyx - y afraid of x. If I got everything here right then according to the link to the second order logic that Raymott provided then :

Some cat is feared by every mouse. <=> There exists a cat which is feared by every mouse. <=> ​

Every mouse is afraid of some cat. <=> For every mouse, there is some cat that the mouse fears. <=>

Yet there seems to be some ambiguity. I mean from formal logic point of view they are two different sentences with different meaning.

is not equivalent to

but the problem has arisen somehow from natural language in the first place.


@ Mike That's why I'm asking the questions and having that discussion - and stripping away determiners might give me some insight how they work and what kind of problems may striping them away posts.

@ Barb It's that kind of ambiguity I'm on about. They not always are apparent to everyone at once; Is the fist initial interpretation that the something is the personal something ? Even though the personal something might be the same thing for everyone, but the thing is definitely not Sara Lee.

Cheers,

 

[MikeNewYork]

Jaskin, I understand your problem, but it is difficult for an English speaker to deal with ambiguity and nuance in a foreign language. In my life, I have studied Latin, Spanish, and German. I have dabbled in Italian. But nuance and subtlety is not easy to master.

 

[Raymott]

Yet there seems to be some ambiguity. I mean from formal logic point of view they are two different sentences with different meaning.

is not equivalent to

but the problem has arisen somehow from natural language in the first place.

That's the nature of an ambiguous sentence. You can express it in two logically different ways. That is one of the reasons that formal logic was invented, as an attempt to express propositions in a non-ambiguous way. This would not be necessary if natural sentences were never ambiguous. If you strip away the determiners, you get something like "mice fear a cat", or "A mouse fears a cat" or "Mice fear cats". Whoever invented the quantifiers obviously thought that they could help to disambiguate sentences like that - and they can.
If natural language was inherently logical, I doubt whether there would have been a need to invent formal logic. It wasn't so they could drape non-ambiguous sentences around pretty non-ambiguous symbols.