Hello everybody and welcome to our video nugget about looking at language.

What I want to do in this nugget is to basically show you natural language phenomena together

with their meaning.

So what are the differences and problems, some of them, of understanding the meaning

of natural language.

So one of the things you can try and understand is just for very simple sentences what the

readings of word or word complexes are.

In this case I want to show you adjectival complexes.

So if you have a very simple sentence, we're talking about an object that might be a thing

that sits on a table in front of me, you can see this, and then we might hear something,

the utterance, this is a diamond.

The question is what you now know about the object in front of you.

Well I've put it on the right-hand side, we know if we believe the speaker, but we'll

assume that for the moment, that this is a diamond.

The object is a member of the sets of diamonds.

So that holds in the world if we believe the speaker.

Now let's make this a little bit more complex, how about the sentence, this is a blue diamond.

Well obviously you know what to do, we know that the object is a diamond, and we also

know that it's blue.

So next test, this is a big diamond.

Well things become a little bit more fishy, we still know this is a diamond, but is it

big?

Well debatable, right?

A big diamond, think engagement ring, something three carats, is something that is of this

size.

But a big diamond of course is much smaller than a very small elephant.

Very small elephant might be a young elephant and it's still this size at the minimum, which

is much bigger than a big diamond.

So we can't really say this is big.

We might say kind of in a loophole, say it's big for a diamond, but the difference here

is that being blue is kind of absolute, and being blue for a diamond is the same as being

blue in the world.

So we have a difference here, but it gets worse.

Think about this as a fake diamond, then of course no longer is the object a diamond,

but it might be glass or something like that.

So this where we have the in blue and big, where we basically modify without destroying

the noun meaning, with fake we're actually turning it into its opposite.

We know that this is not a diamond.

And then of course it gets even more complicated if you talk about fake blue diamond, then

you really have multiple meanings.

The blue might be fake because the diamond isn't blue, but kind of been covered in a

clear blue lacquer, or it's not a diamond, but it really is blue glass, or it might even

be white glass or transparent glass covered in a blue lacquer.

So we really don't know, but of course we understand it anyway.

So the mechanics of even something very simple, like the adjective that kind of modifies the

meaning of the noun that it comes with, isn't as simple as we might see.

In the first case, we can think of the meaning of the word diamond as the set of objects

that are diamonds, and the meaning of blue, the set of objects that are blue, and somehow

this here is a clear, just simple intersection of sets.

Blue diamonds are those that are in the set of blue things, and in the set of diamonds