This basically cannot happen in real life, because most people do not think clearly about which sense of a preposition they are using. So if you divide up those meanings of "with", all three words will start to take on all nine meanings, and you will just have uselessly multiplied words.
This basically cannot happen in real life, because most people do not think clearly about which sense of a preposition they are using.
The fact that people don't reflect about the sense in which they use a preposition doesn't mean that they can't learn to use a specific preposition for a specific purpose. In reality people can say "on Monday" while saying "in July" and "at night" without getting confused.
If you have the sentence "Galileo saw a man with a telescope" people do mentally distinguish two cases of with ...
I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.