Scope ambiguity
Example from Normalized legal drafting and the Query method (Allen, 1978)#
Persons who are doctors and lawyers qualify.
What is the scope of and?
- [Persons who are doctors] and [persons who are lawyers] qualify
- Persons who are [doctors and lawyers] qualify
We will 100% need to support all kinds of scope ambiguity. Natural language contracts are full of it. People like reading it and writing it. To spell out “persons who are doctors qualify and persons who are lawyers qualify” sounds like the worst kind of robotic Controlled Natural Language#.
A full explicit sentence is useful for a human-directed ambiguity check (“did you mean … or …”), but not as the primary compilation target.
