Ambiguity

« Ambiguity A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning.

The word ‘light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark.

Words like ‘light', ‘note', ‘bear' and ‘over' are lexically ambiguous.

They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as ‘light suit' and ‘Theduchess can't bear children'.

However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituentsis.

The phrase ‘porcelain egg container' is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence ‘The police shot the rioters with guns'.

Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like ‘I left her behind foryou' and ‘He saw her duck'.

The notion of ambiguity has philosophical applications.

For example, identifying anambiguity can aid in solving a philosophical problem.

Suppose one wonders how two people can have the sameidea, say of a unicorn.

This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes ‘idea' in the sense of a particularpsychological occurrence, a mental representation, from ‘idea' in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept.

Onthe other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions.

Accordingly, the questionarises of how genuine ambiguities can be distinguished from spurious ones.

Part of the answer consists inidentifying phenomena with which ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness andindexicality.

1 Types of ambiguity Ambiguity is a property of linguistic expressions.

A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning.

Obviously this definition does not say what meanings are or what it isfor an expression to have one (or more than one).

For a particular language, this information is provided by agrammar, which systematically pairs forms with meanings, ambiguous forms with more than one meaning (seeSemantics ).

There are two types of ambiguity, lexical and structural .

Lexical ambiguity is by far the more common. Everyday examples include nouns like ‘chip', ‘pen' and ‘suit', verbs like ‘call', ‘draw' and ‘run' and adjectives like‘deep', ‘dry' and ‘hard'.

There are various tests for lexical ambiguity.

One test is having two unrelated antonyms, aswith ‘hard', which has both ‘soft' and ‘easy' as opposites.

Another is the conjunction reduction test.

Consider thesentence, ‘The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court'.

Evidence that the word ‘suit' (notto mention ‘press') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the ‘crossed interpretation' of the sentence, onwhich ‘suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and ‘one' to a legal action.

The above examples of ambiguity areeach a case of one word with more than one meaning.

However, it is not always clear when we have only oneword.

The verb ‘desert' and the noun ‘dessert', which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinctwords (they are homonyms).

So do the noun ‘bear' and the verb ‘bear', even though they not only sound the samebut are spelled the same.

These examples may be clear cases of homonymy, but what about the noun ‘respect' andthe verb ‘respect' or the preposition ‘over' and the adjective ‘over'? Are the members of these pairs homonyms ordifferent forms of the same word? There is no general consensus on how to draw the line between cases of oneambiguous word and cases of two homonymous words.

Perhaps the difference is ultimately arbitrary.

Sometimes onemeaning of a word is derived from another.

For example, the cognitive sense of ‘see' (to see that something is so)seems derived from its visual sense.

The sense of ‘weigh' in ‘He weighed the package' is derived from its sense in‘The package weighed two pounds'.

Similarly, the transitive senses of ‘burn', ‘fly' and ‘walk' are derived from theirintransitive senses.

Now it could be argued that in each of these cases the derived sense does not really qualify asa second meaning of the word but is actually the result of a lexical operation on the underived sense.

This argumentis plausible to the extent that the phenomenon is systematic and general, rather than peculiar to particular words.Lexical semantics has the task of identifying and characterizing such systematic phenomena.

It is also concerned toexplain the rich and subtle semantic behaviour of common and highly flexible words like the verbs ‘do' and ‘put' andthe prepositions ‘at', ‘in' and ‘to'.

Each of these words has uses which are so numerous yet so closely related thatthey are often described as ‘polysemous' rather than ambiguous.

Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase orsentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases ‘Tibetan history teacher', ‘a student of highmoral principles' and ‘short men and women', and the sentences ‘The girl hit the boy with a book' and ‘Visitingrelatives can be boring'.

These ambiguities are said to be structural because each such phrase can be representedin two structurally different ways, for example ‘[Tibetan history] teacher' and ‘Tibetan [history teacher]'.

Indeed,the existence of such ambiguities provides strong evidence for a level of underlying syntactic structure (seeSyntax ).

Consider the structurally ambiguous sentence, ‘The chicken is ready to eat', which could be used to describe either a hungry chicken or a cooked chicken.

It is arguable that the operative reading depends on whetheror not the implicit subject of the infinitive clause ‘to eat' is tied anaphorically to the subject (‘the chicken') of themain clause.

It is not always clear when we have a case of structural ambiguity.

Consider the elliptical sentence,‘Perot knows a richer man than Trump'.

It has two meanings, that Perot knows a man who is richer than Trump andthat Perot knows a man who is richer than any man Trump knows, and is therefore ambiguous.

But what about thesentence ‘John loves his mother and so does Bill'? It can be used to say either that John loves John's mother and Billloves Bill's mother or that John loves John's mother and Bill loves John's mother.

But is it really ambiguous? Onemight argue that the clause ‘so does Bill' is unambiguous and may be read unequivocally as saying in the contextthat Bill does the same thing that John does, and although there are two different possibilities for what counts asdoing the same thing, these alternatives are not fixed semantically.

Hence the ambiguity is merely apparent andbetter described as semantic underdetermination.

Although ambiguity is fundamentally a property of linguisticexpressions, people are also said to be ambiguous on occasion in how they use language.

This can occur if, evenwhen their words are unambiguous, their words do not make what they mean uniquely determinable.

Strictlyspeaking, however, ambiguity is a semantic phenomenon, involving linguistic meaning rather than speaker meaning(see Meaning and communication ).

Generally when one uses ambiguous words or sentences, one does not consciously entertain their unintended meanings, although there is psycholinguistic evidence that when one hearsambiguous words one momentarily accesses and then rules out their irrelevant senses.

When people use ambiguouslanguage, generally its ambiguity is not intended.

Occasionally, however, ambiguity is deliberate, as with anutterance of ‘I'd like to see more of you' when intended to be taken in more than one way in the very same contextof utterance.

2 Ambiguity contrasted It is a platitude that what your words convey ‘depends on what you mean'. This suggests that one can mean different things by what one says, but it says nothing about the variety of ways. »