Timeline for How can syntactic ambiguity with pronouns be avoided?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 8, 2018 at 8:25 | comment | added | beroal | I like the recommendation of indexing. If you want to learn more about variables, mathematical logic or lambda calculus is a better place to start than programming languages. Popular programming languages have complexity irrelevant to the task. De Bruijn indexing in lambda calculus may be interesting. | |
| Feb 7, 2018 at 14:39 | vote | accept | hyperneutrino | ||
| Feb 7, 2018 at 13:20 | comment | added | Gufferdk | @HyperNeutrino in that case ambiguity could be resolved by having either James or James' father (and the possessor) be proximal. In an isolated example like that this would be perfectly reasonable, assuming you don't have a problem with shifting the focus away from Adam, in a stretch of natural discourse, whether this would be reasonable or not would depend on various factors, such as which of the participants is already the established topic, etc. Such shifts can resolve a lot of (but not all) ambiguous cases if really necessary. | |
| Feb 6, 2018 at 23:04 | comment | added | user15 | yes lojban has "assignable pro-sumti and pro-bridi" lojban.org/publications/cll/cll_v1.1_xhtml-section-chunks/… | |
| Feb 6, 2018 at 22:58 | comment | added | hyperneutrino |
+1, the idea of proximate and obviative pronouns was what I had in mind (without knowing the proper terms at the time) and I'm glad someone answered with that as one of the ideas. However, how would one avoid ambiguity in a sentence such as Adam gave James's father sleeping pills to help with his [obviative] stress? (it's a bad example, I know)? Does "his" refer to James or James's father?
|
|
| Feb 6, 2018 at 22:54 | history | answered | Sascha Baer | CC BY-SA 3.0 |