 We will not give here a detailed explanation of the semantics of these two formalisms; suffice to say, in (\(\ref{boygirl3}\)) the value of \(w\) does not depend on the values of \(x\) and \(y\) (although it may depend on the value of \(z\)), as they belong to different “rows” of the complex quantifier \(\left(\begin{smallmatrix} \forall x &amp;\exists y\\ \forall z &amp;\exists w \end{smallmatrix}\right)\), while in (\(\ref{boygirl4}\)) the value of \(z\) does not depend on the value of \(x\), because this dependency is explicitly “slashed away” by the quantifier (\(\exists z / x\)).