No Sentence Is Too Confusing To Ignore
Paul F. Cook, Suzanne Stevenson · 2010
We consider sentences of the form No X is too Y to Z, in which X is a noun phrase, Y is an adjective phrase, and Z is a verb phrase. Such constructions are ambiguous, with two possible (and oppo-site!) interpretations, roughly meaning ei-ther that “Every X Zs”, or that “No X Zs”. The interpretations have been noted to de-pend on semantic and pragmatic factors. We show here that automatic disambigua-tion of this pragmatically complex con-struction can be largely achieved by us-ing features of the lexical semantic prop-erties of the verb (i.e., Z) participating in