There is NO exact interpretation of the above sentence. It is possible that the man peered through a telescope to see the boy, or that the man saw a boy who had a telescope.
One may reasonably argue that one interpretation is more likely but either may be true.
Ambiguity is an immense problem in semantic analysis, compounded by assumed speaker intent, etc.
Ultimately there is no exact interpretation or meaning of all language unfortunately.
Right, but human conversation doesn't work like that. A real usage would be more like "The man saw a boy with his telescope. The boy was running down the beach, apparently screaming out at the sea."
Using "a" in place of "his" in speech would be unnatural and would raise eyebrows. "His" is still ambiguous though, and any human speaker would know that and provide more context. The second sentence disambiguates the sentence sufficiently. Eleuther's online demo still fails badly given the above prompt:
> The boy saw the man, stopped, turned around, and looked at the man angrily, pointing at the horizon. The man saw a break in the waves, and he walked towards the boy. The boy ran into the sea, and the waves tried to take the man, but the man was able to escape from the waves. The boy was angry. He called the man a “nasty pirate.” The man went home and told his mother about the boy and the pirate. The man’s mother said, “He’s just a kid, he probably has no idea what he’s saying.”
All good comments and I don't disagree completely. Most humans get around just find reading books and communicating.
Interestingly though, there are miscommunications between humans and not just because someone said "the man saw a boy with his telescope" without sufficient context.
The intractable problem is that human language has evolved to require context or presumption of intent and these are not stated or confirmed. Therefore probabilities MUST be assigned to them. There is no exactness because the context and intent are not stated/communicated/written, they are by definition assumed.
This assumed knowledge works in many cases but fails in others. The difficulty comes when the audience does not AGREE with the assumption.
TLDR: Humans communicate by assuming that their audiences share some of their beliefs but sometimes the unspoken beliefs of the audience don't match the speakers'.
There is NO exact interpretation of the above sentence. It is possible that the man peered through a telescope to see the boy, or that the man saw a boy who had a telescope.
One may reasonably argue that one interpretation is more likely but either may be true.
Ambiguity is an immense problem in semantic analysis, compounded by assumed speaker intent, etc.
Ultimately there is no exact interpretation or meaning of all language unfortunately.