8 LOGIC MACHINE II: ENGLISH AS A FORMAL LANGUAGE

We shall now encounter an extraordinary instance of scientific chutzpah in the history of linguistics: Nowadays, human language is routinely treated as a formal language, with a rule-governed syntax and semantics. Once we understand how it works, we will see that the ambiguities we noted at the outset are not at all signs of a mediocre design but rather by-products of the highly systematic nature of language. There are sometimes two meanings because there are two ways to form sentences in the syntax.