No Sentence Is Too Confusing To Ignore

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 opposite!) interpretations, roughly meaning either that “Every X Zs”, or that “No X Zs”. The interpretations have been noted to depend on semantic and pragmatic factors. We show here that automatic disambiguation of this pragmatically complex construction can be largely achieved by using features of the lexical semantic properties of the verb (i.e., Z) participating in the construction. We discuss our experimental findings in the context of construction grammar, which suggests a possible account of this phenomenon. 1 No noun is too adjective to verb Consider the following two sentences: (1) No interest is too narrow to deserve its own newsletter. (2) No item is too minor to escape his attention. Each of these sentences has the form of No X is too Y to Z, where X, Y, and Z are a noun phrase, adjective phrase, and verb phrase, respectively. Sentence (1) is generally taken to mean that every interest deserves its own newsletter, regardless of how narrow it is. On the other hand, (2) is typically interpreted as meaning that no item escapes his attention, regardless of how minor it is. That is, sentences with the identical form of No X is too Y to Z either can mean that “every X Zs”, or can mean the opposite—that “no X Zs”!1 Note that in examples (1) and (2), the nouns interest and item are the subjects of the verbs deserve and escape, respecThis “verbal illusion” (Wason and Reich, 1979), so-called because there are two opposite interpretations for the very same structure, is of interest to us for two reasons. First, the contradictory nature of the possible meanings has been explained in terms of pragmatic factors concerning the relevant presuppositions of the sentences. According to Wason and Reich (1979) (as explained in more detail below), sentences such as (2) are actually nonsensical, but people coerce them into a sensible reading by reversing the interpretation. One of our goals in this work is to explore whether computational linguistic techniques—specifically automatic corpus analysis drawing on lexical resources—can help to elucidate the factors influencing interpretation of such sentences across a collection of actual usages. The second reason for our interest in this construction is that it illustrates a complex ambiguity that can cause difficulty for natural language processing applications that seek to semantically interpret text. Faced with the above two sentences, a parsing system (in the absence of specific knowledge of this construction) will presumably find the exact same structure for each, giving no basis on which to determine the correct meaning from the parse. (Unsurprisingly, when we run the C&C Parser (Curran et al., 2007) on (1) and (2) it assigns the same structure to each sentence.) Our second goal in this work is thus to explore whether increased linguistic understanding of this phenomenon could be used to disambiguate such examples automatically. Specifically, we use this construction as an example of the kind of difficulties faced in semantic interpretation when meaning may be determined by pragmatic or other extra-syntactic factors, in order to explore whether tively. In this construction the noun can also be the object of the verb, as in the title of this paper which claims no sentence can/should be ignored.