Languages & Linguistics
Lexical Ambiguity
Lexical ambiguity refers to the presence of multiple meanings for a single word or phrase. This ambiguity can arise due to different interpretations, contexts, or word usage. It can lead to confusion or misunderstanding in communication, and is an important consideration in linguistics and language processing.
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11 Key excerpts on "Lexical Ambiguity"
eBook - ePubTranslation between English and Arabic
A Textbook for Translation Students and Educators
- Noureldin Abdelaal(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Linguistic ambiguity in translation can arise from ambiguity in the ST. If a translator fails to identify and resolve such ambiguity, or due to a lack of full understanding of the ST and the context of its situation, a translator may create an ambiguous translation. Among the various linguistic ambiguities mentioned by Newmark, Lexical Ambiguity is the most problematic. Lexical Ambiguity can be divided into two main categories; one holds that words have Lexical Ambiguity prior to their semantic occurrence in a text; the other considers that Lexical Ambiguity is context dependent, which means that it occurs due to the effect of the text (Simpson, 1981). Lexical Ambiguity can result from either homonymy or polysemy (Newmark, 1988). Examples of problems in translating polysemous and homonymous words are discussed in the following sections. 4.3 Lexical Ambiguity : Polysemy and Homonymy Newmark (1988) argued that Lexical Ambiguity is one of the ambiguities that cannot be easily resolved. Such ambiguity mainly arises from polysemy, homonymy, or metaphorical vs. literal meanings. Lexical Ambiguity is very common in language, as a single string of words may lead to more than one interpretation due to one of the words having more than one meaning: polysemy (Klepousniotou, 2002 ; Simpson, 1981). However, polysemy can be confused with homonymy, in which two words with the same spelling or pronunciation have two different meanings. According to the generative lexicon approach, homonymy ensues when discrete senses are stored separately, whereas, in polysemy, only the elementary meaning is stored in the lexical repertoire of the language user (Klepousniotou, 2002 ; Klepousniotou & Baum, 2005). In other words, polysemy refers to a multiplicity of meanings such as when one word is used in different fields with different meanings (Geeraerts, 2010)
eBook - PDFLanguage and the Law
With a Foreword by Roger W. Shuy
- Sanford Schane(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
boats with the same name but it is indeterminate as to which one was to carry bales of cotton; and there are deplumed and eviscerated chickens but it is uncertain whether they are to be classified as manufactured products. The broad meaning attributed to the term ambiguity has to do with lan-guage use – with what is said and with how it is understood. Lawyers and legislatures, as well as ordinary citizens, ideally should use language that is clear, certain, unequivocal and to the point, and when it is unclear, uncertain, doubtful or equivocal, then language is considered to be ‘ambiguous’. Opposed to this general view of ambiguity is a more restricted meaning. It is this narrow sense that typically finds expression in grammatical trea-tises and in the field of linguistics, the discipline that studies the properties of human language. One of the truly fascinating aspects of language is the potential for ambiguity. Linguists recognize two principal types: Lexical Ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity. Both have relevance for misunder-standings that may arise in the interpretation of legal documents. 8 Lexical Ambiguity potentially occurs whenever a word has more than one objective or dictionary meaning. The ambiguity is potential because it is only in certain contexts that more than one of the meanings may be pos-sible. A well-known example from the linguistics literature concerns the word bank . It can refer to a financial institution or to the edge of a river or stream. The sentence, ‘I’ll meet you at the bank at three o’clock’, written or uttered in isolation, could be ambiguous between the two meanings. Yet, most of the time we are unaware of any ambiguity, and, in fact, we find none because other linguistic features from elsewhere in the discourse, or even non-linguistic clues, render only one of the readings as possible.
eBook - PDFFrom Ancient Manuscripts to Modern Dictionaries
Select Studies in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek
- Tarsee Li, Keith Dyer(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Gorgias Press(Publisher)
It is a ubiquitous feature of a natural language. As the term is employed in this paper, it may be defined as the “ability to be understood in more than one way” ( OED ). 1 From its inception, the International Syriac Language Project (ISLP) adopted the aim of laying the foundations for a corpus-by-corpus series, see Falla, “A Conceptual Frame-work,” 13–14. 10 F ROM A NCIENT M ANUSCRIPTS TO M ODERN D ICTIONARIES Thus “an expression or utterance is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way.” 2 A word is ambiguous when it has more than one possible meaning in a particular context. Conversely, a word can be said to be “unambiguous” when only one meaning works compositionally. The paper does not pursue the subject of am-biguity versus vagueness as it is described and debated in linguistics to distinguish between a form or phrase that is ambiguous because it has two distinct meanings (as in “John saw the man with binoculars”) or that is vague (as in “Help wanted”). 3 Nor does it include the complex subject of figurative speech, which may be considered as a form of ambiguity, 4 except where an occurrence of a word’s literal sense has a figurative meaning that may be unclear to many readers. 1.1 D ICTIONARIES THAT D O N OT F EATURE A MBIGUITY In the world of words, ambiguity is an ever-present presence and is what inspired William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity , a critical and influential work on the ef-fectiveness of ambiguity in poetry. For the lexicographer, semantic and syntactic ambiguity are expected and common features. Instances of ambiguity, however, do not have a place in modern-language dictionaries or, except for unresolved items of ambiguity associated with homonymy and polysemy, 5 in ancient-language lexicons that serve their respective literature generally.
- Paul Kroeger(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
94 5.3 Lexical Ambiguity is indeterminate with respect to gender; but if I say Te nurse who checked my blood pressure was pregnant , the context makes it clear that the nurse I am refer-ring to is female. We noted in the preceding section that the context of use generally makes it clear which sense of a lexically ambiguous word is intended. Tis is not to say that misunderstandings never arise, but in a large majority of cases hearers flter out unintended senses automatically and unconsciously. It is important to rec-ognize that knowledge about the world plays an important role in making this disambiguation possible. For example, a slogan on the package of Wasa crisp-bread proudly announces, Baked since 1919 . Tere is a potential ambiguity in the aspect of the past participle here. It is our knowledge about the world (and specif-ically about how long breads and crackers can safely be le f in the oven), rather than any feature of the linguistic context, which enables us to correctly select the habitual, rather than the durative, reading. Te process is automatic; most people who see the slogan are probably not even aware of the ambiguity. Because knowledge about the world plays such an important role, disambigua-tion will be more difcult with translated material, or in other situations where the content is culturally unfamiliar to the reader/hearer. But in most monocul-tural se tings, Ravin & Leacock’s (2000) assessmen t seems fair: Polysemy is rarely a problem for communication among people. We are so adept at using contextual cues that we select the appropriate senses of words efortlessly and unconsciously… Although rarely a problem in lan-guage use, except as a source of humour and puns, polysemy poses a prob-lem for semantic theory and in semantic applications, such as translation or lexicography. If Lexical Ambiguity is not (usually) a problem for human speakers, it is a sig-nifcant problem for computers.
eBook - ePub- Sebastian Loebner(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
3Ambiguity
In dealing with meaning in the previous chapters, expressions were treated as though they had only one meaning (though possibly composed of different dimensions). This is, of course, not the case. Many, if not most, words have more than one meaning and even complete sentences may allow for several readings. The technical term for this phenomenon is ambiguity: an expression or an utterance is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way. The notion of ambiguity can be applied to all levels of meaning: to expression meaning, utterance meaning and communicative meaning. In dealing with ambiguity, we will first turn to the level of lexical meaning. This is in accordance with the general bottom-up perspective on interpretation taken in this book (1.2 , 1.3 ).3.1 LEXEMESIn 1.2.1 we distinguished lexical meaning from compositional meaning. Lexical meaning must be learned and stored in our mental lexicon; compositional meaning is the meaning of composite expressions and is derived ‘on demand’ from the meanings of the components by applying general semantic rules. Those linguistic units which carry lexical meanings are called lexemes. Typically, lexemes are single words, but there are also composite expressions with a special lexicalized meaning. Therefore ‘lexemes’ cannot just be equated with words. Examples of composite lexemes are so-called idioms like throw in the towel meaning ›give up‹ or fixed adjective-noun combinations such as white lie , broad bean or little finger . Composite lexemes need not be idioms like the ones mentioned. Less spectacular cases are particle verbs such as give up , fill in , look forward to , put on , figure out , etc.Lexemes are stored in the lexicon of the language, a huge complex structure in the minds of the language users. Lexical meaning is not to be confused with the meaning you may find in a dictionary. Dictionaries describe the meanings of their entries by means of paraphrases. For example, you may find the meaning of bird described as ‘feathered animal with two wings and two legs, usually able to fly’ (New Oxford Dictionary of English ). In order to understand the description, you have to know what these other words, feathered , animal , etc. mean. If you look these up in turn, you will find yet other words used for their description. Dictionaries are in this sense circular. No matter how carefully they are compiled, they will always contain an irreducible set of words the meaning of which is not, in fact cannot be, explained in this way. By contrast, the lexical meanings we have in our mental lexicons are not
eBook - PDFStatutory Interpretation
Pragmatics and Argumentation
- Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno, Giovanni Sartor(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The similarities between the two 3.1 Introduction. Ambiguity and Interpretation 99 concepts can be brought to light by taking into account the notions of ambiguity and vagueness that underlie this distinction, revealing their common pragmatic nature. 3.1.2 The Meanings of Ambiguity The legal concepts of interpretation and construction highlight the distinction and relationship between ambiguity and vagueness (Schiffer, 2016, 47). To address these distinctions, it is useful to rely on the literature in philosophy of language and pragmatics, starting from the definition of ambiguity. Naess provided the following description of this concept (Naess, 2005a, 31): « . . . is ambiguous» =D. «There is at least one pair of instances of « . . . » such that the first member of the pair expresses a different meaning from the second.» This definition is general, as it includes both its pragmatic sense, concerning the use of an expression in a specific context (namely the expression token), and its semantic one, which takes into account a “grammatical” unit, namely a component of the linguistic system abstracted from its use (Gullva ˚g and Naess, 1996). In this perspective, the “potential” ambiguity that affects the lexical items and the syntactic construction of the semantic representation becomes actual when it results in an ambiguity that concerns the use of the expression. The distinction between these two levels of ambiguity is shown in Table 3.1 (Macagno and Bigi, 2018; Walton, 1996, 262). The distinction between homonymy and polysemy is drawn based on linguistic conventions. While homonymy is linguistically defined as two separate linguistic conventions governing the use of a word (such as “bank,” meaning both the riverside and the building), polysemy is intuitively defined as the association of different normal and related uses for the same word, namely in terms of synchronic processes that derive one use from the other (Nunberg, 1979, 145).
eBook - PDF- Robert D. Sutherland(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
8 AMBIGUITY I never make bets, Clara said very gravely. Our ex-cellent preceptress has often warned us - You'd be none the worse if you did! Mad Mathesis interrupted. In fact, you'd be the better, I'm certain! Neither does our excellent preceptress approve of puns, said Clara. Lewis Carroll, A Tangled Tale, Knot III 8.1 PREFATORY STATEMENT In addition to clarifying vague language and explaining the idiosyncratic use of words with conventionally established meanings, stipulative definition is useful in resolving ambiguities. Verbal ambiguity occurs whenever an utterance - be it a word, phrase, sentence, or group of sentences - is capable of having for the inter-preter more than one signification in a given context. It has already been shown that Lewis Carroll considered most words to be ambiguous (§ 4.5). The present chapter illustrates his exploitation of this realization in his literary works. As will be seen, he was aware of other types of ambiguity than that possessed by individual words. He saw that sentence structure itself could create ambiguities, and on several occasions he used this syntactic ambiguity (sometimes called amphiboly) as a source of humor. This chapter deals first with Lexical Ambiguity and then proceeds to a consideration of syntactic ambiguity and contextual ambiguity. 8.2 Lexical Ambiguity 8.2.1 The Nature and Functional Cause of Lexical Ambiguity Lexical Ambiguity occurs when a word having two or more distinct significations in conventional usage occurs in a verbal context which does not make clear to the interpreter which one of these significations is intended.. Words which, viewed in AMBIGUITY 165 isolation outside of any context, are potentially capable of being interpreted in more than one way depending upon the particular context they are placed in, may be called equivocal.
- Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2.3 Ambiguity and semantic theory Ambiguity has played a central role in the development of semantic theory by providing crucial data for both building and evaluating theories of lexical rep-resentation and semantic composition. Cases of ambiguity are often “analyti-cal choice points’’ which can lead to very different conclusions depending on how the initial ambiguity is evaluated. For example, whether scope ambiguities are taken to be structural (reflecting different Logical Forms), lexical (reflecting optional senses, possibly derived via type-shifting), or compositional (reflecting indeterminacy in the application of composition rules) has consequences for the overall architecture of a theory of the syntax-semantics interface, as noted above. Consider also the ambiguity of adjectival modification structures such as (15) (first discussed in detail by Bolinger 1967; see also Siegel 1976; McConnell-Ginet 1982; Cinque 1993; Larson 1998 and article 12 [this volume] (Demonte) Adjectives ), which is ambiguous between the “intersective’’ reading paraphrased in (15a) and the “nonintersective’’ one paraphrased in (15b). 244 Christopher Kennedy (15) Olga is a beautiful dancer. a. Olga is a dancer who is beautiful. b. Olga is a dancer who dances beautifully. Siegel (1976) takes this to be a case of Lexical Ambiguity (in the adjective beautiful ), and builds a theory of adjective meaning on top of this assumption. In contrast, Larson (1998) argues that the adjectives themselves are unambiguous, and shows how the different interpretations can be accommodated by hypothesizing that nouns (like verbs) introduce a Davidsonian event variable, and that the adjec-tive can take either the noun’s individual variable or its event variable as an argument.
eBook - PDF- Roberto R. Heredia, Anna B. Cieślicka(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Cognates do not have an intralingual counter- part, although they come close to polysemous words. Polysemous words are words in one language with several, related meanings (e.g., chicken referring to an animal and to the meat of the animal that is consumed). Contrary to homographs (also called homonyms), polysemous words are usually easier to process (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002). The interlingual ambiguous words are compared to control words that exist only in one language and that are matched on lexical factors includ- ing frequency, length, and word neighbors (e.g., the English control word daisy has no overlap with the Dutch translation madeliefje). If processing of the ambiguous words is different from that of the control words, this is considered as evidence for the coactivation of the various meanings of the ambiguous word in the different languages. In the present chapter, we review studies investigating this ambiguity processing across languages with a focus on ambiguity resolution in interlingual homographs and homophones. We come to the conclusion that, on encountering an ambiguous word, all known meanings (and pronunciations) of the word are initially activated, independent of the context in which the word occurs. Inappropriate meanings are subse- quently inhibited on the basis of the ongoing language processing. Top- down context expectations have no effect on the initial activation of meanings and limited effect on the subsequent meaning inhibition. Homographs Within Languages The monolingual literature on Lexical Ambiguity has been an important starting point for studies in the bilingual field (e.g., Degani & Tokowicz, 2010). As we indicated in the Introduction to this chapter, lexical ambi- guity exists not only between languages but also within languages (e.g., the word bank may mean a financial institution or a riverside).
eBook - PDFPolysemy
Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language
- Brigitte Nerlich, Zazie Todd, Vimala Herman, David D. Clarke, Brigitte Nerlich, Zazie Todd, Vimala Herman, David D. Clarke(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2.2. Antithesis Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff 1987), there has been one approach to linguistics - cognitive linguistics - for which metaphor has been I don't believe in word senses 365 a central phenomenon. Metaphor is, amongst other things, a process whereby words spawn additional meanings, and cognitive linguists are correspondingly interested in polysemy. Lakoff's analysis of the polysemy of mother is hugely cited. Word sense ambiguity can often be seen as a trace of the fundamental processes underlying language understanding (Sweetser 1990). The structures underlying the distinct meanings of words are at the heart of the cognitive linguistics enterprise (Taylor 1989; Geeraerts 1990). Working in this framework, Cruse (1995) gives a detailed typology of polysemy. He distinguishes polysemy, defined according to distinctness of meaning, from polylexy, which is where, in addition to distinctness of meaning, distinct lexical entries are required. A word is polysemous but not polylexic where its non-base meanings are predictable, so they can be generated as required and need not be stored. He also addresses where readings are antagonistic and where they are not, and the characteristics of the different semantic properties, or facets, of a sense. He uses ambiguity tests to tease out a number of issues, and a full Cruse lexical entry would contain: a specification of polysemous senses; their lexical relations including their relations to each other; whether they were antagonistic or not; the facets, shared or otherwise, of each, and the extent to which distinct facets of meaning could operate autonomously, so approach the status of senses on their own. He considers several varieties of semi-distinct readings. Lexical Ambiguity has also moved centre-stage within theoretical and computational linguistics.
eBook - PDF- Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Members of the first subgroup comprise lexically ambiguous words, whose ambiguity is inherited by the whole expres-sion. For instance, the ambiguity of the noun Schule ‘school’ (with readings like ‘building’, ‘institution’, ‘staff and pupils’, or ‘lessons’) makes expressions like die Schule begutachten ‘evaluate (the) school’ ambiguous, too. Polysemy belongs to this group but homonymy 542 V. Ambiguity and vagueness does not: Different readings of polysemous words belong to the same lexeme and do not differ syntactically. In contrast, homonymous items are syntactically different lexemes. Underspecified accounts of polysemy model the semantics of a polysemous item in terms of a core meaning common to all readings. This was worked out in Two-level Semantics (Bierwisch 1983; Bierwisch & Lang 1987; Bierwisch 1988), which distin-guished a semantic level (where the core meanings reside) and relegated the speci-fication of the individual readings to a conceptual level (see articles 16 (Bierwisch) Semantic features and primes and 31 (Lang & Maienborn) Two-level Semantics). In the case of Schule ‘school’, the ambiguity can be captured in terms of a core meaning S ‘related to processes of teaching and learning’. This meaning is then fully specified on the conceptual level in terms of operators that map S onto an intersection of S with properties like ‘building’, ‘institution’ etc. Underspecification formalisms covering polysemy include the semantic representa-tion language in the PHLIQA question-answering system (Bronnenberg et al. 1979), Poesio’s (1996) Lexically Underspecified Language, and Cimiano & Reyle’s (2005) version of Muskens’ (2001) Logical Description Grammar. Lexical ambiguities were also spotted in sentences with quantifiers that have collec-tive and distributive readings (Alshawi 1992; Frank & Reyle 1995; Chaves 2005a). For instance, in (22), the lawyers can act together or individually: (22) The lawyers hired a secretary.
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