Is that sentence in anyway to anyone here ambiguous?
Yes, it's a simple example from logic. The two possible meanings are:Some cat is feared by every mouse.
My main problem with the sentence is that it is impossible. Trying to explain it with logic seems to be, in itself, illogical. There is no cat on the planet that has been in contact with every mouse. So every mouse cannot fear a particular cat. For the second, I am quite certain that there are some mice on the planet that have not encountered any cat. It would only take one such mouse to make the second interpretation false.
They all mean practically the same thing to me. I don't see how "There is chocolate for all of you" is ambiguous like the 'cat' sentences.There is chocolate for all of you.
There is chocolate for each of you.
There is chocolate for every one of you.
I think the first is the most ambiguous in the same way or in the same sense as the unfortunate example with cat. The last one I find to be the least ambiguous.
How to disambiguate such statement in natural language ? Is there any good literature on that ?
They all mean practically the same thing to me. I don't see how "There is chocolate for all of you" is ambiguous like the 'cat' sentences.
To me, it only means one thing. "None of you need/will go without chocolate." What do you see as an alternative meaning?
No, I don't think you can infer that. "There is chocolate for all of you" has the pragmatic meaning that there's enough to go around. It can't mean "There is some chocolate for all of you to fight over."But is the meaning you see matter of formal logic interpretation or pragmatic implicature?
Er ... the meaning I saw in that sentence was purely from experience of the language. I guess that's pragmatic implicature.
The pragmatic implicature wasn't so obvious with 'some cat' example.
Maybe. I'd put it that there were two possible pragmatic meanings in the 'cat' example.
It's in the same sense as cat example because there is the 'some chocolate', 'all of you' and functional connective in between.
There is some chocolate (one bar) or so you must decide who will get it.
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