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94 lines
4.3 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
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<title>4/prp</title>
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
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<link href="inweb.css" rel="stylesheet" rev="stylesheet" type="text/css">
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<!--Weave of '4/aoc' generated by 7-->
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<ul class="crumbs"><li><a href="../webs.html">★</a></li><li><a href="index.html">linguistics</a></li><li><a href="index.html#4">Chapter 4: Grammatical Categories II</a></li><li><b>Adverbs of Certainty</b></li></ul><p class="purpose">To represent levels of certainty.</p>
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<ul class="toc"><li><a href="#SP1">§1. Scale of certainties</a></li></ul><hr class="tocbar">
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<p class="inwebparagraph"><a id="SP1"></a><b>§1. Scale of certainties. </b>Inform uses the following scale to measure how certain it is that something
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is true:
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</p>
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<pre class="definitions">
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<span class="definitionkeyword">define</span> <span class="constant">IMPOSSIBLE_CE</span><span class="plain"> -2</span>
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<span class="definitionkeyword">define</span> <span class="constant">UNLIKELY_CE</span><span class="plain"> -1</span>
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<span class="definitionkeyword">define</span> <span class="constant">UNKNOWN_CE</span><span class="plain"> 0</span>
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<span class="definitionkeyword">define</span> <span class="constant">LIKELY_CE</span><span class="plain"> 1</span>
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<span class="definitionkeyword">define</span> <span class="constant">CERTAIN_CE</span><span class="plain"> 2</span>
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</pre>
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<p class="inwebparagraph"><a id="SP2"></a><b>§2. </b>A special certainty level is used for a temporal sense of certainty:
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</p>
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<pre class="definitions">
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<span class="definitionkeyword">define</span> <span class="constant">INITIALLY_CE</span><span class="plain"> 3</span>
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</pre>
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<p class="inwebparagraph"><a id="SP3"></a><b>§3. </b>Certainty adverbs are found mainly in regular sentences:
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</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>A door is usually open.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p class="inwebparagraph">They are syntactically legal in existential sentences too, though in
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English this usually expresses emphasis rather than a measure of
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probability: consider "there certainly are men in the room". Inform allows
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this, in any case.
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</p>
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<p class="inwebparagraph">Note that no adverb corresponds to the <code class="display"><span class="extract">UNKNOWN_CE</span></code> certainty level, which
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expresses no information.
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</p>
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<p class="inwebparagraph">The use of certainty adverbs is a point of difference between Inform's two
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grammars. In assertions one can write
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</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>A box is usually closed. [1]</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p class="inwebparagraph">but in conditions one can't write
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</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>if a box is usually closed, ... [2]</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p class="inwebparagraph">This is because [1] is essentially a statement about the future, not the
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present or the past, whereas conditions like [2] must always be determinable at
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once: Inform cannot know what will generally happen, only what is now the case
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and what has been the case in the past.
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</p>
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<pre class="display">
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<span class="plain"><</span><span class="identifier">certainty</span><span class="plain">> ::=</span>
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<span class="identifier">always</span><span class="plain">/</span><span class="identifier">certainly</span><span class="plain"> | ==> </span><span class="constant">CERTAIN_CE</span>
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<span class="identifier">usually</span><span class="plain">/</span><span class="identifier">normally</span><span class="plain"> | ==> </span><span class="constant">LIKELY_CE</span>
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<span class="identifier">rarely</span><span class="plain">/</span><span class="identifier">seldom</span><span class="plain"> | ==> </span><span class="constant">UNLIKELY_CE</span>
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<span class="identifier">never</span><span class="plain"> | ==> </span><span class="constant">IMPOSSIBLE_CE</span>
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<span class="identifier">initially</span><span class="plain"> ==> </span><span class="constant">INITIALLY_CE</span>
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</pre>
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<p class="inwebparagraph"></p>
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<hr class="tocbar">
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<ul class="toc"><li><a href="4-prp.html">Back to 'Prepositions'</a></li><li><a href="4-apoo.html">Continue with 'Adverb Phrases of Occurrence'</a></li></ul><hr class="tocbar">
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<!--End of weave-->
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</html>
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