negation - Understanding the purported ambiguity in “Every boy didn’t run”


I am a com­puter sci­ence pro­fes­sional. I am read­ing the book Nat­u­ral Lan­guage Un­der­stand­ing by James Allen where he writes:



“Every boy didn’t run” which is am­bigu­ous be­tween the read­ing in which some boys didn’t run and some did and no boys ran.



As I am not a na­tive English-lan­guage speaker, I couldn’t un­der­stand the am­bi­gu­ity here. Please ex­plain how the mean­ing can ever be some boys didn’t run and some did here.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?