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<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <Paper uid="E85-1002"> <Title>HOW DOES NATURAL LANGUAGE QUANTIFY?</Title> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> HOW DOES NATURAL LANGUAGE QUANTIFY? </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"/> </Section> <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> ABSTRACT </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> It has traditionally been assumed that Natural Language uses explicit quantifier expressions (such as &quot;all&quot; and &quot;most&quot;, &quot;the&quot; and &quot;a&quot;) for the purpose of quantification. We argue that expressions of the first type are comparatively rare in real world Natural Language sentences, and that the latter (articles) cannot be considered straightforward quantlfiers in the first place. However, practically all applications of Natural Language Processfng require sentences to be quantified unambiguously. We llst a few possible ( syntactical, semantical, and &quot;pragmatical&quot;) sources of &quot;implicit&quot; quantiflcatlonal information in Natural Language; they combine in sometimes intricate ways to give a sentence a (more or less) unambiguous quantification.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> i. THE LACK OF EXPLICIT QUANTIFICATION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> - &quot; I. i INTRODUCTION The subject of the present paper is not strictly one of Computational LinEuistics. Neither does it outline a working computer program, nor investigate a linguistic problem with the help of computational methods. A/though the subject may be purely linguistic in character it is particularly relevant to Computational Linguistics. Moreover it seems to have been ignored by most non-computational linguists.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Computational as well as non-computational linguists agree that we have to represent Natural Language sentences as quantified logical sentences, either in a graphical variant of logic such as semantic networks, or in some other form of logic. However, non-computational linguists do not very often use real-world examples in their investigations; they create their own example sentences to make a certain point. Everything which is not in the prhnary focus of their interest is made so explicit as to become largely self-explanatory. They tend, for instance, to create only sentences where quantification is explicit. Computational linguists, on the other hand, have to use real world texts. They have to face certain nasty facts of life which they, too, would prefer to ignore. One of them concerns the way in which Natural Language quantifies.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 1.2 THE TRADITIONAL POINT OF VIEW: QUANTIFIERS ARE EXPLICIT </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Traditionally it has almost always been assumed that quantification is expressed in Natural Language by explicit means. The most traditional view had it that simple surface words correspond one-to-one to the two classical quantifiers: &quot;every&quot; and &quot;all&quot; stand for the universal quantifier, &quot;some&quot; for the existential quantifier: every man is mortal some gods are mortal However, it has long been known that the overwhelmlng majority of real world sentences simply don't contain any of those explicit simple quantifier words.* For this reason (among others) Barwise and Cooper (1981) suggested that the concept of simple quantiflers should be extended to the concept of- gemern\]|~ed quant/fiers. They should take care of simple cases such as most men as well as of very complicated ones such as more than half of John's arrows. A generalised quantifer consists, in English, of a determiner (such as . 11 . n most or more than half of ) and a set expression in the form of a noun phrase (such as &quot;men&quot; or &quot;John's arrows&quot;). Determiners are some, e'~e~, each, all, both, no, neither, many, fev;, most, a few, one, etc. However, even now a sizeable majority of sentences in any real world text would appear to lack quantification. That's why the most obvious determiners, viz. the and a (plus zero) have to be included in this list.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> But that's also where a new set of problems originates. Articles have always caused problems when treated as quantifiers, and recently these problems have become increasingly' more difficult to ignore (Kamp 1981).</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 1.3 PROBLEMS WITH THE INTERPKETATION OF ARTICLES AS QUANTIFIERS </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Again we start with the most traditional view of the question how articles could be interpreted as quantifiers. It saw both definite and indefinite articles as existential quantlfiers, with some addi-Uonal information in the case of the definite article. It was primarily this &quot;additional information&quot; which caused much discussion.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> * or verb phrases such as &quot;there is&quot; - quite possibly the only &quot;real&quot; existential quantifier English has.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> I. 3. i Is the Definite Article an Existential Quantifier? Russell, in his classical analysis of the definite article (1905), maintained that a sentence such as</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 1) The President of France is bald </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> should be interpreted as follows</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="9" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> EXISTS X: (president_of_frence(X) AND NOT(EXISTS Y: (presidant_of_frence(Y) AND NOT(X=Y))) AND bald(X) ) </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Here the &quot;additional information&quot; is given in the universal statement that X is the one and only President of France. Strawson (1950) pointed out that sentences such as 2 2) The king of France is bald wou/d simply be false irrespective of whether a) there was exactly one king of France but he was not bald, b) there was no king of France to begin with, or c) there were several kings of France. Our intuition tells us that in case a) sentence 2 would certainly be &quot;simply false&quot; but in cases b) and c) it would be false &quot;in a different way&quot;. Strawson argued that Russell hadn't made the distinction between a sentence as such and the statement made by the use of a sentence.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Sentences such as example 2, uttered at the present time, and under condition a), were non-evaluable (not Strawson's term) rather than false. They may be evaluable, and even true, at other points in time (or space, we might add). A definite noun phrase, then, does not assert the existence of some object, it only refers to it, and in doing so it presupposes its existence. In the same sense it doesn't assert the uniqueness of the object referred to, either, it only presupposes it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Unfulfliled presuppositlons don't make sentences false, they make them&quot; non-evaluable, i.e. the question of whether they are true or false doesn't arise. Whether the presuppositions of such a sentence are fulfilled depends on the concrete circumstances, given by the context.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Subsequently it was noticed that Strawson's analysis gave no satisfactory explanantion for cases such as 3, 4 and 5: 3) The unicorn is a mythical creature.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> 4) The lion is a dangerous animal.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> 5) The dog is barking.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> In 3 we certainly don't presuppose the existence of unicorns, but the sentence makes nevertheless perfect sense. 4 is actually the same case although the fact that lions do exist may obscure this fact at first. We obviously presuppose the existence of the concept of unicorns and lions in the listener's mind, but not the existence of these animals in the real world.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> Example 5 shows that definite noun phrases don't presuppose uniqueness of real objects, either. 5 makes perfect sense, in the appropriate context, but nobody would presuppose that there is only one dog in the world. The suggestion that we could temporarily restrict the universe of discourse to the point that it contains only one dog, precisely the one that is barking, is hardly very convincing on intuitive grounds alone, and furthermore McCawley (1981:265) pointed out that it would make sentences 6 and 6a equivalent, which they definitely are not.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> It might be more appropriate to talk about uniqueness in a contextual domain (McCawley 1981:265, expanding on Karttunen 1976; also Platteau 1980, Kamp 1981, Frey/l%eyla 1983) whose members are created by the context, and are not necessarily elementary real world objects (as in the universe of discourse) but can be sets of real objects, or possibly even purely notional objects such as concepts. As the problems of definite reference are treated in-depth elsewhere in this volume (Berry-Rogghe) we will restrict ourselves to this very sketchy outline of the problem. The main point in this context is that any notion of the definite article having an existential quantifier as one of its components has evaporated along the way from Russell's analysis to contemporary views. Without additional sources oPS quantification a considerable proportion oPS real world sentences would now appear to be merely un-quantified, meanlngless, expressions, which they certainly aren't. But it gets even worse.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> I. 3.9. Is the Indefinite Article an Existential Quantifier? The indefinite article seems, on the surface, to cause much less trouble than the definite article. Its interpretation as an existential quantifier always looked quite straightforward. However, it was noticed (Kamp 1981) that indefinite articles sometimes must be represented as universal quanriflers. Prominent among these cases are the so-called donkey sentences, exemplified by sentences 7 and 8.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> 7) If Pedro owns a donkey he is rich.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> 8) If Pedro owns a donkey he beats it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> where the top-most syntactic connector of the English sentence, i.e. the conjunction &quot;if&quot;, corresponds to the top-most connector of the logical form, i.e. the implication. However, if we apply the same schema mechanically to example 8 it will produce the non-sentence 8a:</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="15"> This is not a logical sentence because the variable &quot;X&quot; in the consequent is outside the scope of the existential quantifier and remains unbound. 8 must therefore be represented as 8b</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="17"> where the indefinite article is now represented as a universal quantifier. Now we are in the most unsatisfactory situation that we have to represent two s~rntactically very similar surface sentences by two radically different logical sentences, and that the same noun phrase has to be mapped into an existential quantifier one time, into a universal quantifier another time.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="18"> If we try to consistently represent indefinite articles as universal quantfflers we get 7b as representation for 7 7b) ALL X: ((donkey(X) AND owns(pedro,X)) IMPLIES rich(pedro)).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="19"> which is indeed logically equivalent to 7a, but on purely formal grounds. The scope has been artiflcially extended to span over terms without any variables, which certain/y runs very much against our intuition about the meaning of the original sentence. The conclusion cannot be avoided that even the seemingly innocuous indefinite article cannot be represented as a straightforward existential quantifier.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="20"> i. 4 COUNTEREXAMPLES: MOST QUANTIFI~.RS</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="8" start_page="9" end_page="9" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> ARE IMPLICIT </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> However, if articles are no longer available as explicit quantiflers we are in real trouble: Either all those Natural Language declarative sentences that do not contain any of the explicit quantifier expressions (&quot;most&quot;, &quot;some&quot;, &quot;there is&quot; etc.) cannot be represented as logical sentences at all for their lack of quantification, or else we have to find sources of ciuantiflcatlonal information other than explicit quantifier expressions. Now, if we look at sentences 9 to 14 we have to admit a) that they are reasonably normal sentences, b) that they contain no explicit quantifier expressions, and c) that our intuition tells us nevertheless that they are unambiguously quantified.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> 9) A dog is eating meat.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> 10) A dog eats meat.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> 10a) Dogs eat meat.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> Ii) A man who loves a woman is happy.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> 12) A man who loves a woman respects her.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> 13) A man who loves a woman will Elve her a ring. 14) A man who loves a woman will defend her ag-ln~t an attacker.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> We think, therefore, and try to show in this paper, that there must be many more sources of quantificatlonal information in NL than \]ust the traditional, explicit, cases. But the information is scattered over whole sentences, or even paragraphs, and must be combined to get a (more or less) reliable quantification for a sentence.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> This is a rather unattractive state of affairs: Traditionally, it was assumed that at least the form of quantifiers in hrL sentences was unproblematical, and that we could concentrate right away on the questions of their scope, monotonlcity etc., difficult enough in their own right. If our diagnosis is correct, this is not so. In the rest of the paper we will try to list some of the other possible sources of quantiflcational information in NL. None of them will be of the &quot;on/off&quot;-variety; they are all more llke interacting forces resulting in a net force tipping the balance one way mr the other. We will go through all the examples listed above, considering slightly more complex cases as we go along, and try to show how different these seemingly similar examples ~really are as far as their quantif~cati0n is concerned.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="9" start_page="9" end_page="21" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> SOURCES OF IMPLICIT QUANTIFICATION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE SYNTACTIC MEANS TO EXPRESS QUANTIFICATION </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> 2.1. I Verbal Form The most important way to determine the quantification of a sentence by syntactic * means is through the choice of the verb form. This becomes particularly clear when we look at examples 9 to 10a. They are striking cases in that 9 is a prototypical case of an assertion about an individual event and 10 and 10a are equally prototypical universal ~ules. However, it could be argued that the mass noun used (&quot;meat&quot;) unnecessarily complicates the situation. So let's replace them with the perfectly regular examples 15 to 18.2 15) A text editor makes modifications to a text file.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> 16) A text editor is making modifications to a text file.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> 17) A text editor made modifications to a text file. 18) A text editor has made modifications to a text file.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> In example 15 we say that a text editor makes modifications to a text file in general, almost by deflnltion. We might read this sentence in a system manual. In 16 to 18 we say, on the other hand, that there is, or was, a case of a text editor making modifications to a text file. These remarks might be made by a system operator, watching his screen. In 16 to 18 we express, of course, additional information about the temporal relationships involved, but we will ignore them in the present context, a Sweeping under the carpet the question of how we would have to represent the sentence predicate we could, as a very first approximation, represent the example with the verb in the present tense, 15, as 15a and the examples with verbs in either the past tense or in the perfective or progressive aspect, 16 through 18, as 16a:</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> AND makes_modifications .... (T)).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> We must qualify these statements at once.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> I. In many cases the future tense is preferred over the present tense for the kind of general statements given in example 15. 19 is definitely more acceptable than 20: 19) A man who loves a woman will stroke her.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> 20) A man who loves a woman strokes her. 2 Here, and in all the other examples used, the indefinite singular could be replaced by the plural without any change in quantification. We will ,for reasons of simplicity, use only singu/ar examples. Dynamic verbs, such as &quot;to stroke&quot;, seem to call for the future tense, whereas static verbs, such as &quot;to respect&quot;, seem to go better with the present tense. The reason for this seems to be that static verbs do not require the future tense to express their permanent validity, as their very meaning as verbs of disposition etc.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> already conveys this connotation. Many other verbs go either with the present or with the future tense: &quot;Oil floats on water&quot; is as acceptable as &quot;Oil will float on water&quot;.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> 2. The past tense can express a universally quantified assertion, as in &quot;A student read books when I was young&quot;, contrary to what we said above. However, for this universal quantification to be possible the sentence requires a spatial or temporal postmodifier, as the one printed in italics. The universal quantification is then not contributed by the verbal form but rather by the postmodifier; the present tense of the verb merely admits it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> 3. The progressive aspect can express unlversa/ quantification, as in &quot;John is always coming late&quot;. Again, thls is only possible it the quantification proper is contributed ,~alulte explicitly by phrases such as ways&quot;, &quot;in general&quot;, &quot;regularly&quot; etc. The sentence is more emotional than the version in the present tense.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> Ignoring all these exceptions we can formulate the tentative rules i%1 and 1%2 to sum up what the examples considered so far seem to suggest.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> 1%1) The subject of a sentence is existentially quantified if the VP is I. in the past tense, 2. in the progressive aspect, or 3. in the reflective aspect.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="14"> 1%2) Otherwise the subject Is universally quantified, in particular ff it is 1. in the present tense or 2. in the future tense.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="15"> 3 See des Tombe et al., this volume, for a thorough treatment of the problems connected with the representation of temporal information. Once we have determined the quantification of the sentence subiect we have to do the same thing for all other sententlal components. Examples Ii and 12 for instance, repeated here for convenience, 11) A man who loves a woman is happy.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="16"> 12) A man who loves a woman respects her.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="17"> are variants of the donkey-sentences quoted above (7 and 8). There we had the problem that the object of the restrictive relative clause (&quot;a donkey&quot;) had to be quantified existentially in the first case, and universally in the second, syntactically very similar, case. Analogously, we must now determine how &quot;a woman&quot; is to be quantified. Again, intuition tells us that it is to be quantified existentially in example ii but universally in example 12. However, how could we derive this fundamentally different quantification from the syntactically similar surface sentences? It's an intriguing observation that a simple change in notation will make the problem go away. Instead of the Predicate Calculus representation lla and 12a with their different explicit quanti-</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="19"> loves(M, W).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="20"> Under the standard interpretation of Horn-clauses (as in Prolog) a variable is implicitly universally quantified if it appears on the left hand side of a clause, but existentially quantified if it appears exclusively on the right hand side. The interesting fact is that the Horn-clause representations of the surface sentences are structurally as similar to each other as the surface sentences are, and they differ exactly in the same way the sentences do. The seemingly minor change from a intransitive verb phrase (&quot;he is happy&quot;) to a transitive verb phrase referring to an element of the antecedent (&quot;he respects her&quot;) turns an exi.stential quantification (&quot;any man is happy if there ls a woman he loves&quot;) into a universal quantification (&quot;any man respects any woman he happens to love&quot;). And this is the quantification which virtually &quot;falls out&quot; of the Horn-clause representation of theses sentences.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="21"> It will be obvious that other restrictive constructions have to be treated the same way.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="22"> Whether we say &quot;a man loving a woman repects her&quot; or &quot;a woman loved by a man adores him&quot; or &quot;a man respects a woman provided he loves her&quot; in each case we will have to represent these restrictive expressions as right hand terms, as additional conditions on the values of the corresponding variables. We could therefore sketch the following informal translation correspondences: 1. the main verb (or the predicatively used * ~! ), noun or adjective, if the verb Is to be&quot; i.e. the grammatical predicate of the sentence becomes the logical predicate constituting the clause head; 2. an indefinite NP becomes a predicate on the right hand side of the the clause; 3. pronominal reference is represented by the use of the same variable name within one clause : 4. restrictive phrases ( restrictive relative clauses, restrictive adiectlves, conditional clauses) become additional terms on the right hand side of the clause.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="23"> Using these straightforward translation rules, we get a representation of surface sentences where the correct quantification, in many cases, &quot;falls out&quot; of the Horn-clause representation. In these cases we can then say that an indefinite noun phrase corresponds neither to a universal nor to an existential quantifier but that its quantification is a function of its position in the sentence. We will soon see that this kind of nice one-to-one mapping is possible only in a few, simple, cases. 4 If we try to sum up what we gleaned from examples Ii and 12 we could sketch a rule i%3: 1%3) In a restrictive noun phrase those of its arguments are universally quantified that are referred to by the main verb; otherwise they are existenti-l\]y quantified.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="24"> If we combine restrictive constructions with &quot;existentially quantiflying&quot; verb forms, as in example 21) A text editor which made modifications to a text file erased it, we notice that the quantification imposed by the main verb overrides the quantification suggested by the restricitve construction. Example 21 would have to be represented somehow along the lines of 21a: s 21a) text_editor (editorl).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="25"> text_file(filel).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="26"> modifies(editorl, fflel, timel).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="27"> erases ( editorl, filel, timel).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="28"> before(timel, now).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="29"> 4 We do not propose that all natural language sentences can be represented as (the Horn-clause version of) First Order Predicate Calculus sentences. But it seems a sensible idea to start our search for sources of implicit quantificational information with those simple cases where it is possible.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="30"> s Existentially quantified variables not in the scope of a universal quantifier are represented in Horn-clause logic as a system-generated constant, a so- called Skolem-constant, such as &quot;filet&quot;.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="31"> We thus have to modify i%1 to the effect that the main verb form enforces its quantification for all dependent values.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="32"> Nearly all restrictive constructions of the type mentioned in the last section have their non-restrictive counterparts. The restrictive relative clause in example 22 has its counterpart in example 23, where an additional pair of commas is the only syntactic difference, although the meaning of the two relative clauses differs fundamentally. null 22) Swap space which is used for storing editor programs is kept small.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="33"> 23) Swap space: which is used for storing editor programs, is kept small.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="34"> In 22, the restrictive relative clause adds, of course, one mope restriction. In 23, the non-restrictive relative clause asserts additional information. The author wants to make sure that the reader is aware of these facts, and that he absorbs the information if it's new to him before he goes on reading. Accordingly we would have to represent these examples as 22a and 23a</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="36"> We used the verb in the present tense to keep the situation as simple as possible. If we now consider the other possible case, with the verb in the past tense or in one of the marked aspects, we will note that 24 is odd to the point of being ungranunatical, while 25 is perfectly normal.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="37"> 24) A text editor, used for making modifications to a text file, brought the system to a standstill 25) A text editor used for making modifications to a text file brought the system to a standstill We can consequently outline rule i%4 1%4) Non-restrictive constructions translate into additional, universally quantified, assertions.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="38"> Apart from the relative clauses and the reduced relative clauses in the preceding examples we can find non-restrictive constructions in the following cases : I. Present participle : 26) A text editor corrupting text fries is utterly useless.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="39"> 2V) A text editor, making it easy to modify text files, is eminently useful.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="40"> 2. Appositive constructions: 28) A message that deleted files will be exunged by the system will be displayed ve minutes before expunging takes place.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="41"> 12 L 3.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="42"> 29) Another kind of m:%~ that the system is about , will be displayed about one millisecond before it actually happens.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="43"> 30) My friend Peter was here last night. 31) My friend, Peter, was here last night. 32) A command to delete a file will be executed with priority.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="44"> 33) Another type of command, to save a file, will be postponed for a few minutes.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="45"> 34) The decision whether to save or delete a file is normally made by the user.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="46"> 35) Another decision, whether to crash or not to crash, normally isn't.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="47"> Prepositional phrases: 36) A backup file on disk is immune from the effects of system crashes.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="48"> 37) A backup file, on disk, is immune from the effects of system crashes.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="49"> In this case the non-restrlctlve variant, 37, has a strong connotation of causality: &quot; As the file is now on disk, it is immune from the effects of crashes&quot;.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="50"> In all these cases the non-restrlctive construction asserted additional universally quantified information, although the appositive constructions seem to cause more problems than the other cases.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="52"> escape_sequence(E), receives(P, E).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="53"> : - eantronics_printer(P), character (C), escape_sequence(E), receives ( P, E).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="54"> In spoken language we could distinguish between the two readings of sentence 38 by means of stress: The second reading (38b) could be enforced by stress on the verb (&quot;A Centronics printer will PRINT a bold_faced character&quot;) while an even stress distribution on the whole verb phrase (&quot;,.. will PRINT A BOLD_FACED CHARACTER&quot;) would make the first reading (38a) far more probable. In written language we could resort to topicalizers such as &quot;even'r: &quot;A Centronics printer will even print a bold-faced character ...&quot;. It is interesting to note that even in examples 39 and 40 which are quantiflcatlonally unambiguous for syntactic reasons alone (39a) the stress is evenly distributed on the verb &quot;print&quot; and the adjective &quot;bold-faced&quot; (or on the adverbial &quot;in boldface&quot;, respectively). As a matter of fact we could say that stress in English virtually marks certain words of a sentence as &quot;to be represented as clause heads&quot; in the Horn-clause translation of the sentence, with the consecmences for their quantification we just outlined, v If the verb of a sentence is a causative verb we can express the quantification of its argument values by the choice of the appropriate object complement.. Example 38 is ambiguous as far as the quantification of &quot;a bold-faced character&quot; is concerned (the two readings are &quot;will print some bold-faced character&quot;, 38a, and &quot;will print any bold-faced character&quot; it gets, 38b), whereas in 39 and 40 the same expression is unambiguously quantified; both 39 and 40 are mapped into 39a, meaning &quot;will print in boldface any character&quot; it gets. s 38) A Centronics printer will print a bold-faced character whenever it receives an escape sequence. 39) A Centronics printer will print a character bold-faced whenever it receives an escape sequence.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="55"> 40) A Centronics printer will print a character in boldface whenever it receives an escape sequence.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="56"> In the examples 38 to 40 we used the conjunction &quot;whenever&quot; instead of the neutral &quot;if&quot;. This isn't quite unproblematical, as the choice of a conjunctlon may well have its own influence on the quantlflcatlon of some of the values in the sentence(s) involved. However, the precise character of this influence is unclear to us at the present time. In example 41 the noun phrase &quot;a student&quot; somehow seems to have a &quot;higher content&quot; of universal quantification than 42.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="57"> 41) If a student knows the words of a text he can translate it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="58"> 42) When a student knows the words of a text he can translate it. But the two subtly different interpretations seem to be possible only because both &quot;he knows&quot; and he can are ambiguous: In 41 they can be read as &quot;he already knows&quot; and &quot;he is capable of, knows how to&quot;, whereas in 42 they can be read . H . . as has looked up/has found out and he may .</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="59"> s Existentially quantified variables in the scope of a universal quantifier are represented as system-generated functions, so-called Skolemfunctions, whose arguments are the variables over which these universal quantiflers range.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="60"> v Phenomena such as the topic/focus-distinction and stress/intonation are often considered as purely styllstic in character. The examples used will show that this view is often unjustified.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="61"> The Prague school has, of course, always emphaziaed that these linguistic means are often much more than &quot;style&quot;. See the most recent contribution by the Prague school, Sgall 1984.</Paragraph> </Section> class="xml-element"></Paper>