Side question: Does anyone know who at BU made this handout?
And do they know that Felix the Cat is not actually gray either?

It is neat that the first example I found mentioned gray cats at all though.

Deep question: Do human languages do operations like Predicate mod? Are formal semantic descriptions like that actually good descriptions of natural language?
My take is "yes and no," but that's a question for another day.
(end thread)
#linguistics #semantics #ai

Interesting question: do any natural languages do disjunctive predicate modification? As far as I know, no, but maybe?

Less interesting question: Do LLMs do disjunctive predicate mod? Probably no, because LLMs aren't made to do semantic composition. That's not what kind of machine they are.

For this alternate predicate mod. that we can imagine Google AI having, it is the combined set of things that are gray and things that are cats:
[gray cat]1 = {Jerry, Pusheen, ...}
[gray cat]2 = {Jonesy, Duchess, Bugs Bunny, Eeyore, Jerry, Pusheen, ...}

For a semantics did disjunctive pred. mod., "gray cat" would mean "For some X, either 'X is gray' or 'X is a cat' is true."
To put this in set terms (which semanticists like to do), for typical (real? human?) predicate mod, "gray cat" refers to the set of things that are both gray and cats:

While Google's AI is probably just searching out "gray" and "cat" and returning things that fall into either character, in this case it has the appearance of an altered type of predicate modification which replaces "and" (conjunction) with "or" (disjunction).

(This course formalized it slightly different than I learned it. Theirs is something like "the truth of 'X is gray' is the same as the truth of 'X is a cat' and both are true," but this is basically equivalent to explicit conjunction)

In this semantics lesson (found on a Boston U course page), it's described as (informally)
"gray" = "for some X, 'X is gray' is a true sentence"
"cat" = "for some X, 'X is a cat' is a true sentence"
"gray cat" = "for some X, 'X is gray' and 'X is a cat' are both true sentences."
#linguistics

One could call that one a simple misparse. But is something more interesting going on with the rest?

In formal semantics, predicate modification is a way to describe the composition of sentences like “X is a gray cat,” which seem to mean something like “X is gray and a cat.”
#linguistics #semantics

The problem: None of the characters listed here are actually gray cats. Jonesy, Duchess, Mr. Mistoffelees, Vito's cat, and Benny the Ball are all cats, but none are gray. Eeyore and Bugs are both gray, but neither are cats. Edie is in fact neither.
#linguistics #semantics #ai

Obviously we can't expect 21st C English speakers to just natively know how pronouns and agreement worked in the 16th C but just as a reminder if you are writing something set in such a time or just want to evoke it you can find resources for how EME really worked! #linguistics #syntax

HOWEVER what really jumps out is "art," which was the form that went (exclusively) with "thou." "Thou art" vs. "Ye are." So "Ye art" is right out. #linguistics #syntax

The OP screenshot arguably got this partially wrong right away as it seems to use "ye" for singular, though there was a period where "ye" was still used but expanded to include singular. Either way it gets the case right, using "ye" instead of "you" for the subject/nominative. #linguistics #syntax

Pronouns in Early Modern English had a "T/V", ie. singular/plural, distinction for 2nd person. Thou/Thee were the nominative and accusative forms (respectively) of 2nd person singular, while Ye/You were nom. and acc. forms of 2nd plural. Obviously "You" eventually took over everything. #linguistics