Re: What predicates the following relation represents

I want to relate this back to natural language. This example is adapted from Terry Winograd.

"The city councillors denied the protestors a permit for a march because
they feared violence."

"The city councillors denied the protestors a permit for a march because
they advocated revolution."

For the majority of listeners, the word "they" has a different referent in these two sentences. This is not a consequence of the syntax of the sentences, or even of the semantics of the words themselves.

It's a consequence of real world knowledge shared by most listeners and, presumably, by the speaker. This presumption of common "culture", or common
"memes", on the part of people who use natural language, is reflected in the
presumption of a common set of facts that provides the context for the sharing of data. This pervades all of database integration, or for that matter, environments like EDI. Received on Sat Apr 03 2004 - 16:31:35 CEST