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

[Norbert E. Fuchs]

On 20 Jul 2011, at 15:21, Jean-Marc Vanel 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.

Jean-Marc Vanel

I believe that you are mistaken.

Discourse Representation Theory – on which ACE is based – models standard English including the accessibility restrictions for antecedents of anaphors. Please check 

Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle
From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Model-theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory

Section 2.2 discusses the non-accessibility of antecedents in universally quantified sentences.

or 

Patrick Blackburn & Johan Bos
Working with Discourse Representation Theory
http://folli.loria.fr/cds/2006/courses/Blackburn.Bos.WorkingWithDiscourseRepresentationTheory.pdf

In section 1.1, subsection Accessibility you will find the variant "Every woman snorts. She collapses." of your example. The authors state "In this example there is no accessible discourse referent for [she] — the only candidate is [woman], and [woman] is not accessible from [she].

As I wrote before you can get the desired result by reformulation your sentence as

Every call C is urgent or is important.

in which case the variable C is superfluous.

Regards.

   --- nef