6.1.EM. Exercise machine

• Click on the New sentence button to produce a random exercise. A menu at the right lets you choose whether the exercise is to analyze an English sentence or to synthesize a logical form on an intensional interpretation. The menu at the far right lets you choose the size of type used to display the exercise and answer.
• Click on the Advance button to produce the answer line by line (and click on the Back up to undo its effect).

An analysis exercise will often be ambiguous in form and the answer will provide only one of the possible analyses, so you may have to adjust yours if you wish to follow it. The following are rough indications of the direction that will be taken by the analysis in the answer.

• Later conjunctions in a series are usually given wider scope (i.e., so the series will be grouped to the left) unless both is used to mark their scope. Conjunctions in subjects are given wider scope than those in predicates, and conjunctions between verbs are given wider scope than those in their objects.
• Negations are marked by the phrases it is not the case that, fail to, and didn’t. Each is limited to certain grammatical contexts in a way that can, but need not, settle the logical form of the sentence. So we must use it is not the case that if we are going to express the negation of a conjunction of clauses with different subjects, such as Adam walked and Bill talked; and Adam didn’t walk and Bill talked has to be a conjunction whose first conjunct is a negation. Still it is not the case that Adam walked and Bill talked could be given either interpretation, and both may appear in the answers the machine generates.
• Conjunctions and disjunctions are treated in virtually the same way, so the comments above concerning conjunctions apply to disjunctions also. Moreover, the practice of grouping to the left (in the absence of both and either) applies to mixed series of conjunctions and disjunctions. Negated disjunctions are not given any special treatment, so the form neither ... nor will not appear in analysis problems or be used in synthesis answers.
• Conditionals are stated using both of the forms if ... then ... and ... if ..., but only if and unless are not used. There is much room for ambiguity in the scopes of conditionals; while in some cases, this makes no difference for the content of the sentence, in other cases it does. In both sorts of case the machine will choose one interpretation, and it may not be the most natural one.
• Individual terms recognized as components are always intially parenthesized (rather than underlined as in the text’s answers); the unnecessary parentheses are dropped in the final answer. The keys do not number blanks in predicates and functors; they are assumed to be numbered in order from left to right.

The answer to the synthesis exercise will give only one of the many possible ways of putting the symbolic form into English.