Why can surface grammar be misleading about a sentence’s logical structure?

In analytic philosophy, surface grammar can be misleading because the grammatical structure of a sentence in natural language often obscures its true logical form, leading philosophers to mistake linguistic features for ontological ones.1

Formalist philosophers argue that natural language is not a perfect mirror of reality. A primary source of confusion is the tendency to treat all sentences as having a subject-predicate structure. For example, because "Tigers bite" and "Tigers exist" share a similar grammatical form, one might mistakenly conclude that "existence" is a property of tigers, just as "biting" is. However, symbolic logic reveals that existence is not a property but a higher-order function (the existential quantifier) that indicates whether a predicate is satisfied.12

Similarly, Bertrand Russell demonstrated that definite descriptions—such as "the present king of France"—can appear to function as singular terms (names) in surface grammar, even when they refer to nothing. By analyzing these as existentially quantified assertions, logicians can resolve apparent paradoxes and identify "logical fictions" that arise from relying on surface grammar rather than underlying logical structure.231