Hello everybody and welcome to the Video Nugget, real language.

The context of this is looking at language for communication.

We've already seen speech acts as an added complication where language is actually interpreted

as actions and we've seen grammars for language technology.

The last nugget here is about what else can happen if we're looking at real language.

Well, here's the list.

Ambiguity, which we've seen, anaphora, indexicality, vagueness, discourse structure, metonymy,

metaphor, and modern compositionality.

All of those are problems we haven't quite looked at yet.

And I would like to just basically show you a couple of examples of those in language

and actually try to give you a feeling of what's involved.

Here a couple more examples about ambiguity.

Squad helps dog bite victim is something you could see in a headline, in a paper, and of

course you could, depending on how you pronounce it, you could say squad helps dog bite victim.

A dog bite victim is a victim of a dog bite and the squad helps this person.

We can have a helicopter powered by human flies.

I'm not quite sure what that is, but maybe humans with wings.

But because I'll also say that a helicopter that is powered by humans now finally flies.

American pushers bottle up German.

Germans that's maybe in a war, the American pushers, they bottle up German.

But the other one is something where in this headline we could kind of find the, it's something

unintentionally comic here.

And then of course I ate spaghetti with meatballs, with salad, with a band and with a fork, a

friend and so on.

So there's a lot we can do with ambiguity.

It can be, and basically ambiguity can be lexical.

We've seen that with a bank example.

We've seen syntactic, semantic and referential ambiguities.

And that's right.

Give rise to lots of ambiguity and problems in resolving them.

After Mary proposed to John, they found a preacher and got married.

Here the plural complex object of Mary and John kind of introduced along the way implicitly

in this first sentence.

And very often, and that's often a problem, is that the antecedents to the anaphora, here

the plural anaphora, they are just kind of introduced, given world knowledge.

This is a relatively direct thing that after Mary proposed to John, that actually shows

that Mary and John are a couple where a kind of a plural identity might be assumed.

So the they actually works here.

Very often we have what is called bridging references.

For the honeymoon they went to Hawaii.

And here we have the word honeymoon, which is the voyage you undertake after being married.

And being married produces a couple and that here licenses the licenses, the plural reference.

Mary saw a ring through the window and asked John for it, the ring or the window.

Mary threw a rock at the window and broke it.

So presumably in the first sentence, the it refers to the ring.

And here, of course, the it is not the rock, which would be kind of the counterpart for

ring here, but the it references the window.

We have index calc te.

We have seen that it is a pointing thing.

I, you, we, all of those.