If you use a pair of pincers and pull that nail a lot it will come out

[navi tasan]

1) If you use a pair of pincers and pull that nail a lot it will come out.

Does that mean
a) If you pull it a great number of times
or
b) If you pull it really hard it

I think it means 'a', which means that '1' doesn't really work. But maybe '1' has both meanings and could be used in this case?

Gratefully,
Navi

 

[jutfrank]

It doesn't sound like a very natural sentence, Navi. Did you make it up?

As I've mentioned before, you've really got to distinguish carefully between speaker meaning (what the speaker means) and sentence meaning (what the words mean). A large proportion of your questions leads me to believe you may be confusing these two very different things.

If you're asking about speaker meaning (which you should be), then often the best we can do, other than get inside the speaker's head, is have a guess. And if the utterance in question is a) artificial, b) unnatural and c) context-free, there's little point in doing even that. f you make up a sentence, you have to tell us what you mean.

You probably mean 'pull with force', right?

 

[navi tasan]

Thank you very much, Jutfrank,

I made the sentence up. I was testing this 'construct', but if the sentence is unnatural, then I guess there's no point in worrying about what it means. I mistakenly thought that it was a valid sentence. My apologies.

Gratefully,
Navi