InfernalHazelnut

Sorry if this is an obvious 101 question (I'm new here), but isn't there a difference between some of those examples?

I would also say that "how many grasshoppers are there?" has an answer that we simply don't know. But I can't think of "orange is superior to green" being true or false. I can think of ways that it could be better for a purpose (like if we're deciding what color the hunting vests should be), but not what the truth conditions of "orange is superior to green" would actually be.

If you're having an argument over school uniforms, presumably you're saying "Having a uniform will help this school fulfill its mission in... (read more)

Late to the party here, but:

Any English speaker who hasn't been brainwashed with prescriptivist poppycock will tell you that the sentence has two possible readings: one where 'his' refers to Martin, and one where it refers to Bob. In natural language, linear order or closeness tends to matter a lot less than you might think. (This is why many linguistic analyses represent sentences as hierarchical tree structures, and argue that the behavior of some word is predicted by its position in the tree.)

We can even see effects on the resolution of pronoun reference that apply across sentence boundaries:

Martin punched Bob in the face. He fell.

Martin punched Bob in the face. He was... (read more)