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Look no further than the US constitution, particularly its second amendment, to see how much a single punctuation mark can matter. Also sentences like: "the Go
by pclmulqdq 4y ago
Look no further than the US constitution, particularly its second amendment, to see how much a single punctuation mark can matter.
Also sentences like: "the Google party featured two strippers, Larry and Sergei." Are the founders of Google the two aforementioned strippers or VIP guests?
- naniwaduni 4y agoNeither of those examples really hinge on the punctuation. The latter is a constructed absurdity based on violating information structure soft constraints (i.e. the way it's phrased is deliberately unhelpful).
- pclmulqdq 4y agoFor more serious examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma The one I chose was a tongue-in-cheek absurdity. There are other cases where there actually is ambiguity.
- naniwaduni 4y agoNominally, sure. In practice, almost all instances are resolved by context, modulo motivated reasoning.