[Corpora-List] Summary: BE, HAVE, and DO

[John F. Sowa]

On 2/23/2011 8:51 AM, CRuehlemann at aol.com wrote:
> Am I the only one to start thinking about unsubscribing?

At the risk of overloading inboxes with yet another note,
I just wanted to respond to Wladimir and Ronald about the
ambiguities in "We love no other."

The first line of the song is easy to translate to logic:
    loves(I, MyBaby).  loves(MyBaby, I).

But the second line raises the distributive vs collective
interpretations of plurals.  With the distributive option
of 'we', the problematical sentence is expanded to

    I love no other.
    My baby loves no other.

But that raises the question of the referent of 'no other'
in each sentence.  Does it imply no other than the subject
of the sentence or no other than the one I and my baby
were known to have loved from the previous line?

If it's interpreted reflexively -- I love no one but me,
and my baby loves no one but my baby -- that (plus the
previous line) implies I am my baby.

But if 'no other' refers to the objects in the previous
line, it could mean I love no other than my baby, and
my baby loves no other than me.  That implies that
I and my baby could be one self-loving individual or
two individuals who love the other, but not themselves.

The collective interpretation of 'we' would divide humanity
in two sets:  {I, MyBaby} as opposed to all others.  All loving
options are permitted in the in-group, but not to outsiders.

These are the kinds of issues that plague any attempt to
translate natural languages to a logical form.

John Sowa

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