<< Prev | - Up - | Next >> |
For instance, the following sentence contains a lot of scope ambiguities even though its its syntactically unambiguous.
A politician can fool most voters on most issues
most of the time, but no politician can fool all
voters on every single issue all of the time.
There are possible permutations of the scope bearing elements (though not all permutations lead to semantically different readings).
One way to remedy this problem is to under-specify the semantic representation of constituents. This technique has been put to use in particular, for scope ambiguities i.e. sentences such as:
Every yogi has a guru
where either there is one guru for all yogis, or one guru per yogi. These two readings are captured by different scopes for the quantifiers every yogi
and a guru
so that the two meanings of the above sentence are given by the following FOL formulae:
Note that in both cases, we have the same components namely, the yogi-quantifier, the guru-quantifier and the verb semantics. What varies is the order in which the two quantifiers occur.
<< Prev | - Up - | Next >> |