Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hplntx!curry
From: curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Sender: news@hpl.hp.com (HPLabs Usenet Login)
Message-ID: <D3r0t9.7rK@hpl.hp.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 19:58:20 GMT
References: <3gtu3i$rf3@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3GBKw.F5D@spss.com> <3guoku$bci@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3LG9D.G18@hpl.hp.com> <3h69pv$en3@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3nB2v.H6q@hpl.hp.com> <3h8tei$mab@agate.berkeley.edu> <D3p5D7.F5A@hpl.hp.com> <3hbgfe$eks@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3hbsq4$arh@agate.berkeley.edu>
Nntp-Posting-Host: saiph.hpl.hp.com
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Lines: 30


: ] >The similar construction with a conjunction,
: ] 
: ] >"I saw John and Mary." => "Who did you see John and?"
: ] 
: ] >is not grammatical in any language. Why not? It makes perfect sense.
: ] 

: rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) wrote:
: ] It doesn't make sense to me.

jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu wrote:
: An important point.  I see the above argument a lot, i.e., "it
: makes sense".  But it doesn't.  What it looks like is two errors,
: ...
: In short, the sentence given by Bo Curry produces complete
: semantic confusion (in a person who has not previously been
: prepared by a linguistics book to interpret it as attempting
: to ask:  "Who did you see John with?").

Which is precisely the point. The sentence sounds bizarre,
and is clearly ungrammatical. But, *you understand what it means*
(in context, of course, but that's always necessary).

So the bizarreness and ungrammaticality is *not* imposed
by semantic requirements. The sentence sounds bizarre because
it violates your assumptions about how expressions should be
organized.

Bo
