> OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous, but it’s an interesting goal nonetheless.
I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.
Yeah, I can agree with all of this. (Although Anna Wierzbicka’s work on the ‘Natural Semantic Language’ is an attempt to control the latter sort of ambiguity… you might find it quite interesting, actually.)
Emailed, though I’m not sure how much time I’d actually have available to collaborate.
> The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics."
I’ll have a look at it, thanks!
> When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something very specific: monoparsing of sentences to logical statements/semantic formalisms. There ought to be a one-to-one mapping between sentences in the language, and logical sentences in this universal formalism. The claims of those sentences could be as broad or narrow as desired, but there shouldn't be any ambiguity about what is being claimed.
OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous, but it’s an interesting goal nonetheless.