AMBIGUITIES AROUND US

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
ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness and
indexicality.
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, 1. lexical 2.structural.
Lexical ambiguity is ambiguity based on a single word. In many cases, a single
word in a language corresponds to more than one thought, for example, the
adjective light (not dark vs. not heavy); the noun bank (financial institution vs. the
edge of a river); and the verb run (to move fast vs. to direct or manage). Words may
also have more than one meaning through their unrelated use in more than one
category of speech, for example,can (a container of food noun vs. to be able to
verb).

Inattentive use of ambiguous words can lead to humorous, or even awkward
situations, as shown by these newspaper headlines collected by Stephen Pinker.
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Childs Stool Great for Use in Garden
Stud Tires Out
Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
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.
Beside of the above, lexical ambiguity can also lead to humorous sentences, for
example, the following collected from newspapers by Stephen Pinker.
oko Ono will talk about her husband John Lennon who was killed in an
interview with Barbara Walters.
Two cars were reported stolen by the Groveton police yesterday.
No one was injured in the blast, which was attributed to a buildup of gas
by one town official.
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.
As a conclusion, Language cannot exist without ambiguity; which has represented
both a curse and a blessing through the ages. Since there is no one "truth" and no
absolutes, we can only rely on relative truths arising from groups of people who,
within their particular cultural systems, attempt to answer their own questions and
meet their needs for survival. Language is also a very complex phenomenon.
Meanings that can be taken for granted are in fact only the tip of a huge iceberg.
Psychological, social and cultural events provide a moving ground on which those
meanings take root and expand their branches.