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[lojban] Re: Using continuations to model quantifiers, focus, and coordination



There is a theory of grammar that maps sentences onto logical functions,
but this theory has trouble handling quantifiers like "everyone",
"someone", and "only".  If I want to parse "Matt spoke", I can treat
"Matt" as an individual and treat "spoke" as a function that maps an
individual onto a truth value (given X, did X speak?).  But if I use the
same system to parse "Everyone spoke", "everyone" is not an individual
but a function in itself (given an individual X and an action Y, did X
do Y?).  Furthermore, if we turn to the sentence "Matt spoke to
everyone", it seems like we need to interpret "everyone" as a function
of another type.

I'm not sure I follow. To me, everyone is the set of all people (or
possibly less or different depending on context--"everyone in the
room" is the set of all people present in that room).

Applying functions on sets shouldn't be a problem, is it?


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