POSSIBILITY OF THE SEMANTICS OF A SENTENCE

Reference - The knowledge representation scheme above. Consider this sentence - John killed the bird with a gun. We think about the HOW / POSSIBILITY when given a sentence (i.e. the “way” in which it is possible, if so). In the above case that is - There was John. There was a bird. And John fired a bullet from it to hit the bird. The bird died. This is how what the sentence says is possible. (The other non commonsensical way in which this can be true is that John took a bird in his control and hammered a gun on it repeatedly to kill it. But commonsense is not what we are discussing here. We are only discussing possibilities). This possibility-gauging is a primal component of understanding any sentence. How do we judge this possibility, given a sentence? First step - We form a literal mechanical connective model of the English components of the sentence. (Ref the knowledge representation scheme before). The second step is checking the above with our experiences of the real world i.e. we check the validity of 1) the connections and 2) the properties (of the entities and of the connections). There can be invalidity at 3 levels - 1) one node of a connection is wrong 2) both nodes of a connection are wrong 3) a property is wrong. *The connection itself cannot be wrong by itself unless its a word out of the dictionary. Examples - One node is wrong : E.g. The dead man fired a bullet at the police. The connection here is ‘fired bullet’ between the ‘dead man’ and the ‘police’. Clearly the node dead man is wrong. Both the nodes are wrong - e.g. the dead man killed another dead man. The dead man cannot kill and a dead man cannot be killed. So both the nodes are wrong. Property is wrong - The blue phosphorus reacted with oxygen. The property ‘blue’ of phosphorus is wrong. There is nothing like blue phosphorus. Invalidity in possibility-gauging is almost equivalent to not understanding something, (the other case of not understanding being if you don't know the meaning of a word or a phrase).