Abstract
Facilitating the precise interpretation of statements first made in natural language — this has been the role of mathematical notations like predicate calculus and lambda calculus. Their use has been for the clarification of argument. They were faulted for inadequate precision or the introduction of paradox, never for forcing too much precision. Formal languages are precise, but selective in what can be easily expressed. It has always been understood that quantifiers like ∀ and ∃ only modeled some aspects of a system of natural language quantifiers. However, they captured the most useful properties very neatly.
Ken Church, Lowell Hawkinson, Mitchell Marcus, Peter Szolovits, and Lucia Vaina read an earlier version of this manuscript and made many helpful comments. Ellen Lewis and Anne Schmitt did an excellent job of preparing the manuscript and figures. This research was supported by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under contract no. N00014-75-C-0661.
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Martin, W.A. (1984). A Logical Form Based on the Structural Descriptions of Events. In: Vaina, L., Hintikka, J. (eds) Cognitive Constraints on Communication. Synthese Language Library, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9188-6_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9188-6_11
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