
doi: 10.5772/36481
Natural language has features that are not found in logically perfect artificial languages. One such feature is redundancy, where two or more terms/expressions share exactly the same semantic and logical (but perhaps not pragmatic or rhetoric) properties. Another feature is its converse, namely ambiguity, where one term/expression has more than one meaning. A logical analysis of such a piece of natural language will typically translate each of its unambiguous meanings into logically perfect notation. Frege’s Begriffsschrift was the first major attempt in modern logic to create such a notation (though he primarily intended it for mathematical language).1 There are various origins and various manifestations of ambiguity, not least cases bearing on quantifier scopes, like “Every boy dances with one girl”. Another sort of example is “John loves his wife, and so does Peter”, which is ambiguous between Peter loving John’s wife and Peter loving his own wife, because it is ambiguous which property ‘so’ picks up.2 A third, and perhaps less-noticed, sort of ambiguity is pivoted on whether the topic or the focus of a sentence is highlighted. For instance, “John only introduced Bill to Sue”, to use Hajicova’s example,3 lends itself to two different kinds of construal: “John did not introduce other people to Sue except for Bill” and “The only person Bill was introduced to by John was Sue”. There are two sentences whose semantics, logical properties and consequences only partially overlap. A similar phenomenon also crops up in the case of propositional attitudes and their less-attended ‘cousins’ of notional attitudes like seeking and finding, calculating and proving.
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