On Minggu, 03 April 2016
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 'The duchess can't bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can
be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. 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 for you' and 'He saw her duck'.
The notion of ambiguity has philosophical
applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity can aid in solving a
philosophical problem. Suppose one wonders how two people can have the same
idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes 'idea'
in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a mental representation,
from 'idea' in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept. On the other hand,
gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions.
Accordingly, the question arises of how genuine ambiguities can be
distinguished from spurious ones. Part of the answer consists in identifying
phenomena with which.
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| example cartoon ambiguity |
1. Types of ambiguity
Although people are sometimes said to
be ambiguous in how they use language, ambiguity is, strictly speaking, 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 is for an expression to have one (or more than one).
For a particular language, this information is provided by a grammar, which
systematically pairs forms with meanings, ambiguous forms with more than one
meaning (see MEANING and SEMANTICS).
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
ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated antonyms, as with 'hard', which has
both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites. Another is the conjunction reduction test.
Consider the sentence, 'The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the
municipal court'. Evidence that the word 'suit' (not to mention 'press') is
ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the 'crossed interpretation' of the
sentence, on which 'suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and 'one'
to a legal action.
The above examples of ambiguity are
each a case of one word with more than one meaning. However, it is not always
clear when we have only one word. The verb 'desert' and the noun 'dessert',
which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinct words (they
are homonyms). So do the noun 'bear' and the verb 'bear', even though they not
only sound the same but are spelled the same. These examples may be clear cases
of homonymy, but what about the noun 'respect' and the verb 'respect' or the
preposition 'over' and the adjective 'over'? Are the members of these pairs
homonyms or different forms of the same word? There is no general consensus on
how to draw the line between cases of one ambiguous word and cases of two
homonyous words. Perhaps the difference is ultimately arbitrary.
Sometimes one meaning of a word is
derived from another. For example, the cognitive sense of 'see' 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 their
intransitive senses. Now it could be argued that in each of these cases the
derived sense does not really qualify as a second meaning of the word but is
actually the result of a lexical operation on the underived sense. This
argument is 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 phemena. It is also
concerned to explain the rich and subtle semantic behavior of common and highly
flexible words like the verbs 'do' and 'put' and the prepositions 'at', 'in'
and 'to'. Each of these words has uses which are so numerous yet so closely
related that they are often described as 'polysemous' rather than ambiguous.
Structural ambiguity occurs when a
phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases
'Tibetan history teacher', 'a student of high moral principles' and 'short men
and women', and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting
relatives can be boring'. These ambiguities are said to be structural because
each such phrase can be represented in two structurally different ways, e.g.,
'[Tibetan history] teacher' and 'Tibetan [history teacher]'. Indeed, the
existence of such ambiguities provides strong evidence for a level of
underlying syntactic structure (see SYNTAX). Consider the structurally ambiguous
sentence, 'The chicken is ready to eat', which could be used to describe either
a hungry chicken or a broiled chicken. It is arguable that the operative
reading depends on whether or not the implicit subject of the infinitive clause
'to eat' is tied anaphorically to the subject ('the chicken') of the main
clause.
It is not always clear when we have a
case of structural ambiguity. Consider, for example, the elliptical sentence,
'Perot knows a richer man than Trump'. It has two meanings, that Perot knows a
man who is richer than Trump and that Perot knows man who is richer than any
man Trump knows, and is therefore ambiguous. But what about the sentence 'John
loves his mother and so does Bill'? It can be used to say either that John
loves John's mother and Bill loves Bill's mother or that John loves John's
mother and Bill loves John's mother. But is it really ambiguous? One might
argue that the clause 'so does Bill' is unambiguous and may be read
unequivocally as saying in the context that Bill does the same thing that John
does, and although there are two different possibilities for what counts as
doing the same thing, these alternatives are not fixed semantically. Hence the
ambiguity is merely apparent and better described as semantic
underdetermination.
Although ambiguity is fundamentally a
property of linguistic expressions, people are also said to be ambiguous on
occasion in how they use language. This can occur if, even when their words are
unambiguous, their words do not make what they mean uniquely determinable.
Strictly speaking, however, ambiguity is a semantic phenomenon, involving
linguistic meaning rather than speaker meaning (see MEANING
AND COMMUNICATION); 'pragmatic
ambiguity' is an oxymoron. Generally when one uses ambiguous words or
sentences, one does not consciously entertain their unintended meanings,
although there is psycholinguistic evidence that when one hears ambiguous words
one momentarily accesses and then rules out their irrelevant senses. When
people use ambiguous language, generally its ambiguity is not intended.
Occasionally, however, ambiguity is deliberate, as with an utterance of 'I'd
like to see more of you' when intended to be taken in more than one way in the
very same context of 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 in which
this is possible. Semantic ambiguity is one such way, but there are others:
homonymy (mentioned above), vagueness, relativity, indexicality, nonliterality,
indirection and inexplicitness. All these other phenomena illustrate something
distinct from multiplicity of linguistic meaning.
An expression is vague if it admits of
borderline cases (see VAGUENESS). Terms like 'bald', 'heavy' and
'old' are obvious examples, and their vagueness is explained by the fact that
they apply to items on fuzzy regions of a scale. Terms that express cluster
concepts, like 'intelligent', 'athletic' and 'just', are vague because their
instances are determined by the application of several criteria, no one of
which is decisive.
Relativity is illustrated by the words
'heavy' and 'old' (these are vague as well). Heavy people are lighter than
nonheavy elephants, and old cats can are younger than some young people. A
different sort of relativity occurs with sentences like 'Jane is finished' and
'John will be late'. Obviously one cannot be finished or late simpliciter
but only finished with something or late for something. This does not show that
the words 'finished' and 'late' are ambiguous (if they were, they would be
ambiguous in as many ways as there are things one can be finished with or
things one can be late for), but only that such a sentence is semantically
underdeterminate--it must be used to mean more than what the sentence means.
Indexical terms, like 'you', 'here'
and 'tomorrow', have fixed meaning but variable reference. For example, the
meaning of the word 'tomorrow' does not change from one day to the next, though
of course its reference does (see DEMONSTRATIVES AND
INDEXICALS).
Nonliterality, indirection and
inexplicitness are further ways in which what a speaker means is not uniquely
determined by what his words mean (see SPEECH ACTS). They can give rise to unclarity in
communication, as might happen with utterances of 'You're the icing on my
cake', 'I wish you could sing longer and louder', and 'Nothing is on TV
tonight'. These are not cases of linguistic ambiguity but can be confused with
it because speakers are often said to be ambiguous.
3. Philosophical
relevance
Philosophical distinctions can be
obscured by unnoticed ambiguities. So it is important to identify terms that do
doubtle duty. For example, there is a kind of ambiguity, often described as the
'act/object' or the 'process/product' ambiguity, exhibited by everyday terms
like 'building', 'shot' and 'writing'. Confusions in philosophy of language and
mind can result from overlooking this ambiguity in terms like 'inference',
'statement' and 'thought'. Another common philosophical ambiguity is the
type/token distinction. Everyday terms like 'animal', 'book' and 'car' apply
both to types and to instances (tokens) of those types. The same is true of
linguistic terms like 'sentence', 'word' and 'letter' and to philosophically
important terms like 'concept', 'event' and 'mental state' (see TYPE/TOKEN
DISTINCTION).
Although unnoticed ambiguities can
create philosophical problems, ambiguity is philosophically important also
because philosophers often make spurious claims of it. Indeed, the linguist
Charles Ruhl has argued that certain ostensible ambiguities, including
act/object and type/token, are really cases of lexical underdetermination. Saul
Kripke laments the common strategem, which he calls 'the lazy man's approach in
philosophy', of appealing to ambiguity to escape from a philosophical quandary,
and H. P. Grice urges philosophers to hone the 'Modified Occam's Razor: senses
are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. He illustrates its value by shaving
a sense off the logical connective 'or', which is often thought to have both an
inclusive and exclusive sense. Grice argues that, given its inclusive meaning,
its exclusive use can be explained entirely on pragmatic grounds (see IMPLICATURE). Another example, prominent in
modern philosophy of language, is the ambiguity alleged to arise from the
distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions
(see DESCRIPTIONS). Less prominent but not uncommon is
the suggestion that pronouns are ambiguous as between their anaphoric and their
deictic use (see PRONOUNS AND ANAPHORA). So, for example, it is suggested
that a sentence like 'Oedipus loves his mother' has two 'readings', i.e., is
ambiguous, because it can be used to mean either that Oedipus loves his own
mother or that Oedipus loves the mother of some contextually specified male.
However, this seems to be an insufficient basis for the claim of ambiguity.
After all, being previously mentioned is just another way of being contextually
specified. Accordingly, there is nothing semantically special in this example
about the use of 'his' to refer to Oedipus.
Claims of structural ambiguity can
also be controversial. Of particular importance are claims of scope ambiguity,
which are commonly made but rarely defended. A sentence like 'Everybody loves
somebody' is said to exhibit a scope ambiguity because it can be used to mean
either that for each person, there is somebody that that person loves or
(however unlikely) that there is somebody that everybody loves. These uses may
be represented, respectively, by the logical formulas '("x)(Ey)(Lxy)' and
'(Ey)("x)(Lxy)'. It is generally assumed that because different logical
formulas are needed to represented the different ways in which an utterance of
such a sentence can be taken, the sentence itself has two distinct logical
forms (see LOGICAL FORM). Sustaining this claim of ambiguity
requires identifying a level of linguistic description at which the sentence
can be assigned two distinct structures. Some grammarians have posited a level
of LF, corresponding to what philosophers call logical form, at which relative
scope of quantified noun phrases may be represented. However, LF of this kind
does not explain scope ambiguities that philosophers attribute to sentences
containing modal operators and psychological verbs, such as 'The next president
might be a woman' and 'Ralph wants a sloop' (see SCOPE). An utterance of such a sentence can
be taken in either of two ways, but it is arguable that the sentence is not ambiguous
but merely semantically underdeterminate with respect to its two alleged
'readings'.
Notwithstanding the frequency in
philosophy of unwarranted and often arbitrary claims of ambiguity, it cannot be
denied that some terms really are ambiguous. The nouns 'bank' and 'suit' are
clear examples, and so are the verbs 'bank' and 'file'. Philosophers sometimes
lament the prevalence of ambiguity in natural languages and yearn for an ideal
language in which it is absent. But ambiguity is a fact of linguistic life.
Despite the potentially endless supply of words, many words do double duty or
more. And despite the unlimited number of sentences, many have several
meanings, and their utterance must be disambiguated in light of the speaker's
likely intentions.
http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/ambguity.html
