[Attempto] Every call C is urgent or C is important. -- minor bug

[Joshua TAYLOR]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Jean-Marc Vanel
<jeanmarc.vanel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/6/29 Norbert E. Fuchs <fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch>:
> ...
>> Your example
>>
>>> Every call C is urgent or C is important.
>>
>> is parsed as the disjunction of two sentences
>>
>> {Every call C is urgent} or {C is important}.
>>
>> and the DRS generated reflects this correctly. The variable C defined within the first sentence cannot be referred to anaphorically. Thus the second occurrence of C defines a new variable. See ACE 6.6 Interpretation Rules, section 8.3 "A noun phrase antecedent other than a proper name is not accessible if it occurs in a universally quantified or if-then-sentence."
>
> There is no doubt that the behavior is specified in the documentation,
> and it 's good like this :) .
> But the question, beyond this example that indeed could be expressed
> better otherwise, is the "naturalness" of the interpretation by ACE. I
> mean, every human reader (especially mathematically trained) will
> consider that the repeated variable C is the same thing along the
> sentence. Since ACE is defined as a "subset of standard English" , it
> has to meet such human reader's expectations.

There are many utterance whose meaning every human reader can
determine, but it doesn't mean that they're all standard English.  I
think the case at hand is just such an example.

-- 
Joshua Taylor, http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~tayloj/