what is Language Ambiguity
Definition of Language Ambiguity
Empson (1973: 1) indicates that "ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful". Ambiguity lexically means " The possibility of being understood in more than one way." (Oxford word power, 2006: 24) Ambiguity exists when a form has two or more meanings. There are two kinds of ambiguous language, lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity that can affect the meaning of words, phrases or sentences. (Hudson, 200:313,314)
Language ambiguity refers to situations where a word, phrase, or sentence can be interpreted in multiple ways, leading to confusion or misunderstanding. This ambiguity can arise due to various factors such as lexical ambiguity (multiple meanings of words), syntactic ambiguity (multiple ways of parsing a sentence), or semantic ambiguity (multiple interpretations of the meaning of a sentence).(Oxford, 2022).
'Ambiguity', as used by philosophers of language and linguists, refers to a more specific phenomenon than that of multiple permissible interpretations. Distinguishing ambiguity from these related phenomenon can be a difficult and tendentious (and sometimes tedious!) affair. We will discuss testing for ambiguity below: for now, we will try to isolate ambiguity by separating it from other typical cases with which ambiguity is easily conflated. Characterizing vagueness is notoriously (and ironically) difficult, but it seems to stem from lack of precision in the meaning or reference of a term or phrase. There are clearly words that are 4 ambiguous but not (obviously) vague: 'bat' is not vague but it is ambiguous. 'Is bald' looks to be vague but not ambiguous. A general hallmark of vagueness is that it involves borderline cases: possible cases that are neither clearly in the extension of the vague term nor clearly not in its extension. An alternative characterization involves fuzzy boundaries rather than borderline cases (Fara, 2000:47- 48).
Cases of ambiguity can be like this: one can imagine a sorites series involving something that is clearly a baseball bat at t₁ that is changed particle by particle into a chiropteran with borderline cases of each midseries, thus being a vague case of 'bat' in both senses. However, ambiguity need not be characterized by borderline cases nor by soritesseries susceptibility .Interestingly, there are views regarding vague language that treat vagueness as at least akin to ambiguity. Braun and Sider (2007) treat sentences with vague terms as expressing multiple distinct propositions and supervaluationism treats vague terms as expressing multiple distinct semantic values. But the relevant notion of multiple expression seem different from paradigmatic ambiguity, where two meanings are definitely meanings of a term or phrase, not where a bunch of meanings are acceptable ways of making a term more precise. If anything, one might think that these views treat vagueness as a sort of polysemy.(Sennet, 2011:6)
2.Ambiguity in English Language
It is divided into two parts:
1.Lexical ambiguity is extremely common
A crude measure of just how common is provided by the number of definitions provided for words in standard dictionaries. To be sure, many of the fine meaning distinctions found in dictionaries reflect lexicographers' attempts to deal with the 5 vagueness of most natural language words. But genuine polysemy is the rule, rather than the exception, particularly among frequently used words 2.syntactic ambiguity in English is the attachment of modifiers, especially prepositional phrases. Phrasal modifiers typically come at the ends of their constituents, and, since English is predominantly rightbranching(Wasow, 2005:4-5).
3.Types of Ambiguity
There are different sources and types of ambiguities. To explore these, however, we will need to adopt some terminology to make clear what sorts of phenomena we are looking at. Those familiar with some of the issues in current syntactic theory can skip until the next section. Modern linguistic theory involves, in part, the study of syntax. The dominant strain of current syntactic theory takes the lexicon as primitive and studies the rule-governed derivation of syntactic forms, which are structures known as LFs (or, more misleadingly, Logical Forms). The relationship of sentences in natural language to LFs can be one to many: the phonological/orthographic forms of a sentence can be associated with more than one LF. Thus, ‘every man loves a woman’ has been argued (e.g., May 1977) to involve two distinct logical forms. It has also been argued (see May 1985) to involve one that is multiply interpretable with constrained but not determined quantifier scopes. A standard, but controversial, assumption is that LFs are the input to semantic theory, not the phonological/orthographic objects we hear and see. (May, 1985).
Thus, while LFs may not be ambiguous, the sentences we actually use and assert often are. If this assumption turns out to be false, then it will be a great deal more difficult to locate the source of some ambiguities. LFs can be represented as trees, and the terminal nodes of 6 the branches are taken from the lexicon. A lexicon is a repository of lexical items, which need not look like words and they certainly need not correspond to our intuitions about words. Thus, intuitions about a word’s modal profile suggest that it can undergo massive shifts in its orthographic and phonetic properties. It is far less clear that the lexemes retain their identity over shifts of phonological properties. We should be a bit careful, then, about the relationship between words and lexemes: a word may retain its identity while the lexeme it is derived from may not constitute it over time. Fortunately, issues of concerning the diachronic identity of words won’t concern us much here. The LF driven picture of semantic interpretation is controversial for many reasons: some people don’t think that LFs are properly thought of as inputs to anything, never mind semantic interpretation. (Culicover ,2005)
argue for much less extensive syntactic structures coupled with very messy mappings to semantic (or ‘conceptual’) structures. Others think that most of the work done by LFs could be done by taking a notion of surface syntax seriously, trading in syntactic structure for very complicated semantic theories to account for the data. (Bittner 2007, Jacobson 1999).
Thus, the description of some of the ambiguities as syntactic or structural rather than semantic can be somewhat controversial. However, everyone in the game needs something to serve as the input to semantic interpretation and everyone needs some way to describe those structures (if you don’t, call me and let’s talk about it…) so hopefully similar points will hold in your preferred syntactic framework. We will highlight some of these controversies where necessary. One more clarification: ambiguity is a property of either sentences or perhaps the speech acts in which the sentences are used. But ambiguity of a sentence or sentences uttered does not necessarily result in any unclarity regarding what was expressed or meant by the speaker. There is no guarantee that unambiguous utterances will result in full univocal clear understanding either. In some syntactic contexts, the ambiguity won’t show up at all: ‘I want to see you duck’ is a case in which the NP interpretation of ‘duck’ is simply unavailable (especially with no comma after ‘you’). In many cases our best theory predicts an ambiguity in the sentence used, without predicting confusion over how the utterance ought to be interpreted.
