Another News Item -- Was RE: Breeding

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 1, 2007, at 6:40 AM, Doug Harris wrote:

> Absolutely correct. But the sentence implies the 600 have
> none of the appendages mentioned.

no it doesn't.  the sentence is ambiguous, according to how
disjunction and negation scope over one another.  the writer
obviously intended the reading with disjunction as the "higher"
operator: without an arm or without a leg or without a hand or
without a foot.  the reading you got has negation as the higher
operator, so that disjunction is understood as conjunction (NOT(X OR
Y) is equivalent to NOT(X) AND NOT(Y)): without an arm and without a
leg and without a hand and without a foot.

> And it would have been so easy to fix the sentence to say
> what was actually meant.

that would have required the writer to recognize that the second
reading, describing a situation that is much more unlikely in the
real world than the situation described by the first, is available to
readers and might be the one that many readers get.  there's still a
problem in writing here, but it's just the very ordinary one of
writers not seeing an ambiguity that might be troublesome.

> ____________________________________________________________
>
> ---- Original message ----
>> Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 23:38:35 -0400
>> From: Doug Harris <cats22 at FRONTIERNET.NET>
>> Subject: Another News Item -- Was RE: Breeding
>>
>> Today's Washington Post (and other papers) carried an AP-bylined
>> story with
> the headline, in the WP, "Amputee Soldiers Returning To Active
> Duty." Down
> in the story it was reported that:
>>        "So far, the Army has treated nearly 600 service members
>> who have
> come back from Iraq or Afghanistan without an arm, leg, hand or foot."

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