conjunctions - When a sentence contains both “not” and “or”, which one has priority?


I am changing a piece of text which current reads:



Payment not deducted



to also include the situation where payments are withheld. The suggested revision of text given to me is



Payment not deducted or withheld



Is this semantically correct? To me it reads:



Payment not deducted and payment not withheld



when what it should really read as is:



Payment not deducted or payment withheld



The ambiguity can be removed by rephrasing as:



Payment withheld or not deducted



but I’m curious to know the rules regarding the word not preceeding an or.



Answer



Unlike programming languages, in which the way that logical operations like ᴀɴᴅ, ᴏʀ, and ɴᴏᴛ occurring in the same sentence are ordered and applied is governed by strict laws of precedence and supplemented by overriding parentheses at need, human language in general and the English language in specific enjoys no such rigorous set of rules recognized by all speakers and writers, wherefore it is necessary to rewrite all such complex and potentially confusing sentences into simple, more direct forms whose singular and wholly unambiguous interpretation is immediately obvious to all who regard them, a clarification whose merits any lawyer you meet will gladly expound upon at such great length that by the end of his exposition, you will have completely forgotten the point of your original question that you had first posed him.


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