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There is a joke that perfectly illustrates this entire article: A programmers wife asks him, "Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk, and if they have

There is a joke that perfectly illustrates this entire article: A programmers wife asks him, "Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk, and if they have eggs, buy a dozen." The programmer returns home, and his wife is very angry with him. "Why did you buy twelve cartons of milk?!" English SE question detailing the linguistic mechanisms: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40234/bring-6-eggs-if-there-are-potatoes-bring-9 http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40234/bring-6-egg...

jiggy2011 12y ago
Wouldn't this imply that the "buy" instruction is stateful?
- andreasvc 12y ago
  No. It's just the implied object of the second "buy" which is ambiguous.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    But then the programmer would come home empty handed, without even buying the milk.
cousin_it 12y ago
Also, >> At some point I hope to have computer systems I can program by voice in English, as in "House? Could you wake me up at 7?" > Yeah, well, I fear the answer will be yes (it could), but it won't do so since you haven't asked it to wake you up, only if it could. From an exchange on python-list, https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-October/175717.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-October/1...
schoen 12y ago
Wow, the examples in the SE discussion are awesome. I was aware of some of these linguistic issues, but the examples really underscore how subtle pragmatics can be. (The examples give completely syntactically parallel sentences that are pragmatically resolved in opposite ways.)