Ambiguity
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P26-C3
2025-12-06
69
Ambiguity
Sometimes a sentence can have more than one meaning. Sentences of this type are said to be AMBIGUOUS, meaning that the same string of words can be interpreted in more than one way. Consider the following examples:
(1) a The hunter went home with five bucks in his pocket.
b I drove my car into the bank.
c Bill claimed that he saw her duck.
d John hit a man with a telescope.
Each of the sentences in (1) contains a word which has more than one meaning. The word buck can mean either a male deer or (in American slang) a dollar. Similarly, the word bank can mean either a financial institution or a steep slope of land; the word duck can be used to refer to either a waterfowl or an action; and the preposition with can be used to express at least two different semantic relations (instrument vs. accompaniment). These sentences provide examples of LEXICAL AMBIGUITY, sentences which are ambiguous because they contain ambiguous words.1
Now consider the examples in (2):
(2) a the tall bishop’s hat
b the woman on the committee that I met with yesterday
Neither of these phrases contains an ambiguous word, but each of them can be interpreted in more than one way. (Which one is tall, the bishop or his hat? Who did I meet with yesterday, the woman or the committee?) We can often find contexts which make one interpretation or the other more likely, as illustrated in (3). In isolation, however, both interpretations are possible.2
(3) a The short bishop hid the tall bishop’s hat in his back pocket.
b Archbishop Jones tried to compensate for his short stature by wearing his tall bishop’s hat on formal occasions.
The ambiguity in (2) is not due to any ambiguous words. Rather, it arises because the words can be grouped together in two different ways, as shown in (4).
(4) a the [tall bishop]’s hat
the tall [bishop’s hat]
b the woman on [the committee that I met with yesterday]
the [woman on the committee] that I met with yesterday
These phrases provide examples of STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY. This term means that the different interpretations of each phrase arise because we can assign different grammatical structures to the same string of words, even though none of the individual words is itself ambiguous in this context. Such examples demonstrate that words do form sub-groups (or CONSTITUENTS) within a phrase or sentence, and that these groupings are often crucial in determining what the sentence means.
Now consider sentence (5).3 This sentence is ambiguous because each of the two words may belong to more than one syntactic category. One possible interpretation takes mistrust to be a noun and wounds to be a verb. This reading could be paraphrased: “Suspicion hurts (people).” The other possible interpretation takes mistrust to be a verb and wounds to be a noun. This reading could be paraphrased: “(We should) mistrust injuries. ”It requires a bit of work to imagine a situation where this would be a sensible thing to say, but it is nevertheless a possible interpretation of sentence (5).
(5) Mistrust wounds.
This kind of ambiguity about the syntactic category of a word is frequently observed in newspaper headlines, where many function words are omitted and there is no discourse context to rely on. Sometimes this ambiguity produces amusing un intended readings. The examples in (6) are all reported to be actual newspaper headlines; try to identify the words whose category is ambiguous:
(6) Reagan Wins On Budget, But More Lies Ahead
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
Eye Drops Off Shelf
Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
These types of ambiguity illustrate the importance of constituency and category for making sense of what we hear. As we will see, these two concepts are fundamental to any description of sentence structure. In Constituency and 3.4 we will consider the linguistic basis for identifying constituents and categories, respectively.
1. Example (1d) actually involves both structural and lexical ambiguity; can you identify the structural differences between the two readings?
2. In natural spoken English, the two different readings of (2a) would be distinguished by different intonation or stress patterns.
3. From Radford (1988:57).
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