AMBIGUITY

Assalamualaikum warohmatullah wabarokatuh… Today blog is going to be an explanation about AMBIGUITY.

Generally speaking, there are often certain ambiguous words and sentences appearing in human's utterances and acquiring more precise clarification from speakers. Different interpretations of the same utterance may result in various interpretations and the difficulty of comprehension of listeners. It is, actually, a quite common phenomenon among different languages.

A Brief Definition

A simple definition from Chierchia and McConnell (1990: 32) is that 'AMBIGUITY  arises when a single word or string of words is associated in the language system with more than one meaning'. That means a sentence can be interpreted in different ways and it may be caused by multiple meanings of one word.  In general AMBIGUITY is a word which has more than one meaning.

Types of Ambiguity

1. Lexical ambiguity

This type of ambiguity, in written texts, results from multiple meanings of a word, and in spoken language, results from different word forms of the same sounds. With respect to a written text, in a sentence e.g. (1), the word bank can refer to a slope side of a river or a business establishment.

The word captain has one meaning of 'the person in command of a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft' or another meaning of 'a leader of a team or group' so this sentence may be also ambiguous without context.

There  are two reasons for multiple meanings of a word. One is owing to homonyms which have entirely different meanings but share the identical word form, e.g. in (1) where the two meanings of bank are irrelative; these two banks are two lexemes in a linguistic view. The other one is due to polysemy which means the meanings of the same word are relevant but still different to certain extent, for example, in captain includes different interpretations which all refer to a role of a leader.

As for spoken language, ambiguity is caused by either homophones which share the identical sounds with different meanings, or more than one way of breaking up a set of sounds into words. For instance, draft and draught are homophones which probably result in certain ambiguity.

In fact, most of this ambiguity does not cause a problem in a discourse, for readers or listeners can speculate the meaning which the writers or speakers want to express with the context. Furthermore, some writers and speakers use this kind of ambiguity as an element of literature to make a sentence more meaningfully.

Lexical ambiguity example:

Words have multiple meanings. 
"I saw a bat." 
bat = flying mammal / wooden club? 
saw = past tense of "see" / present tense of "saw" (to cut with a saw.)

There is a song title where blue may refer to both the color and sadness. Therefore, there are two forms of lexical ambiguity, of which one is in written language, mainly caused by homonyms and polesemy, and the other one is in spoken language mainly caused by homophones.

2. Structural ambiguity

Structural ambiguity refers to the situation in which 'a sentence may have different meanings because the words of a sentence are related to each other in various ways, even though each word is clear' (Hurford and Heasley 1983: 128).  A sentence like ‘Ted saw a girl with glasses’ illustrates two different possibilities - one is that Ted saw a girl with his glasses; the other one is that Ted saw a girl with her glasses. Distinguishing from lexical ambiguity, all the words in this sentence are clear on their individual meanings.  Thus, a simple test for differentiating these two types is that the sentence which includes more than one structure trees without individually ambiguous words is a structurally ambiguous sentence.

          Even after the syntax and the meanings of the individual words have been resolved, there are two ways of reading the sentence. For example:

1.     "Lucy owns a parrot that is larger than a cat", "a parrot" is extenstensionally quantified, "a cat" is either universally quantified or means "typical cats."

2.    "The dog is chasing the cat." vs. "The dog has been domesticated for 10,000 years." In the first sentence, "The dog" means to a particular dog; in the second, it means the species "dog".

3.    "John and Mary are married." (To each other? or separately?)

4.    "John kissed his wife, and so did Sam". (Sam kissed John's wife or his own?)

3. A combination of lexical and structural ambiguity

This type of ambiguity presents properties of both lexical and structural ambiguity, which means that it has not only an ambiguous word or words but also has more than one possible syntactic structure. Taking for example

1.      duck is an ambiguous word which could be interpreted as a noun - 'a common swimming bird' or a verb - 'to lower (one's head of body) quickly'

 As far as the syntactic category of duck is changed, the structure of this sentence is correspondingly affected. This type of ambiguity is not often considered as one of the main types by some linguists because it is an extreme example of lexical ambiguity or structural ambiguity; whereas, Chierchia and McConnell (1990) explicitly listed this type in their analysis, perhaps because it is inappropriate to classify this combination into either type.

4. Scope ambiguity

This is the final sort of ambiguity which is caused by the possibility of different semantic scope in a sentence. To be more precise, there is no ambiguity in single words or the surface structure; whereas, the semantic scope is indefinite due to other elements, for instance, qualification and negation.

Anaphoric ambiguity

A phrase or word refers to something previously mentioned, but there is more than one possibility.

For example:

1.     "Margaret invited Susan for a visit, and she gave her a good lunch." (she = Margaret; her = Susan)

2.    "Margaret invited Susan for a visit, but she told her she had to go to work" (she = Susan; her = Margaret.)

3.    "On the train to Boston, George chatted with another passenger. The man turned out to be a professional hockey player." (The man = another passenger).

4.    "Bill told Amy that he had decided to spend a year in Italy to study art." 
"That would be his life's work." (That = art) 
"After he had done that, he would come back and marry her." (That = spending a year in Italy) 
"That was the upshot of his thinking the previous night" (That = deciding) 
"That started a four-hour fight." (That = telling Amy) 

In many cases, there is no explicit antecedent.

5.    "I went to the hospital, and they told me to go home and rest." (They = the hospital staff.)

Conclusion

Basically  talked about the types of ambiguity which is an important component in studies of semantics. These four types, namely, lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity and scope ambiguity and a controversial type - the combination of lexical and structural ambiguity all have their own properties although it is not easy to distinguish them very clearly sometimes. Another interesting point is that the spoken lexical ambiguity is also a kind of lexical ambiguity although it is not very often mentioned in books.

Finally, as Cann (1993:1) said in his book, 'a semantic theory must be able to predict the ambiguities in the expressions of a language'. However, some of its aspects are not quite clear-cut even though certain complex means of description have been applied, so ambiguity is still an interesting and complicated topic worthy of further discussion

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