28 Ambiguity

Dr. Anusha Chandramohan

1. Ambiguity

2.Learning Outcome.

3.Introduction.

4.Ambiguity.

5.Common examples of Ambiguity.

6.Various causes of Ambigutiy.

6.1.Polysemy.

6.2.Homonymy.

6.3.Punctuation and pause.

7.Types of Ambiguity.

7.1.Lexical Ambiguity.

7.2.Syntactic or structural Ambiguity.

7.3.Semantic Ambiguity.

8.The advantage of Ambiguity.

9.Function and Significance of Ambiguity in Literature.

10.Examples of Ambiguity in Literature.

11.Ambiguity and Linguistics.

12.Conclusion/ Summary.

Learning outcome:

This module deals with Ambiguity, a major component in Semantics, one of the four significant wings of Linguistics. Also other parameters which causes ambiguity, its types, the purpose of Ambiguity, when and how to avoid ambiguity, its advantages etc…, will be discussed in the module to enhance the holistic understanding of the concept. References, List of websites and YouTube videos will help them study and analyze the concept in-depth and plays a vital role in promoting further study regarding the concept. Multiple choice questions, True or false and Fill in the blanks will help them self-evaluate themselves of their knowledge and understanding of the concept. Moreover for their better understanding, examples are provided wherever necessary.

Introduction: Ambiguity:

Languages are essential tools for human to communicate with each other and record and transfer information everyday; it is difficult to imagine the situation without language delivery. However, a natural language is not so perfectly designed to transfer all the information in an expected way.

More or less, some flaws in a language are inevitable, such as the ambiguity of a language which causes confusion in people’s common utterances. 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. This kind of possible different interpretations is technically called “Ambiguity”.

Ambiguity:

Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. (The “ambi”- part of the name reflects an idea of “two” as in two meanings.)

The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although some may not be immediately obvious), whereas with information that is vague, it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity.

Context may play a role in resolving ambiguity. For example, the same piece of information may be ambiguous in one context and unambiguous in another. Moreover, Ambiguity plays a major role in Semantics (i.e. Meaning)(one of the four major wings in Linguistics)

Common Examples of Ambiguity:

Below are some common examples of ambiguity:

• A good life depends on a liver – Liver may be an organ or simply a living person.
• Foreigners are hunting dogs – It is unclear whether dogs were being hunted or foreigners are being spoken of as dogs.
• Each of us saw her duck – It is not clear whether the word “duck” refers to an action of ducking or a duck that is a bird.
• The passerby helps dog bite victim – Is the passerby helping a dog bite someone? Or is he helping a person bitten by a dog? It’s not clear.

Various Causes of Ambiguity:

• Polysemy.
• Homonymy.
• Punctuation (while writing) pause (while speaking or reading).

Polysemy:

Polysemy- Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. A polysemy is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. Adjective: polysemous or polysemic.

Some Examples:

• Arms bend at the elbow.
• Germany sells arms to Saudi Arabia.
• Boil the solution once with salt and once with sugar.
• Once Germany had surrendered, the Soviets were free to enter the conflict against Japan.
• Is economics an arts subject or a science subject?
• All income is subject to tax.
• While the family was in the garden, an intruder entered the house.
• While your answer is correct, it is not complete.
• Work out the solution in your head
• Heat the solution to 75° Celsius

Homonymy:

Homonyms, or multiple meaning words, are words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings.

Examples: Bear, Left, Pole

• A bear (the animal) can bear (tolerate) very cold temperatures.
• The driver turned left (opposite of right) and left (departed from) the main road.
• Pole and Pole – The first Pole refers to a citizen of Poland who could either be referred to as Polish or a Pole. The second Pole refers to a bamboo pole or any other wooden pole.

Punctuation and pause:

Punctuation and pause plays a vital role while writing, speaking and reading. Proper Punctuation and pause can save lives and do wonders!!!

Some Examples:

I love cooking my pets and my family.

The above example is ridiculous and funny without commas.

The sentence should sound:

I love Cooking, My pets and my family.

Let’s cook Mom.

Let’s cook, Mom.

Thus these are some of the causes of Ambiguity, which makes Language and people funny at times

serious.

Types of Ambiguity:

• William Empson was the first to write and publish the work titled”Seven Types of Ambiguity”.
• In his work, he critiqued poetry and regarded Ambiguity as the highest creative skill.
• It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school.
• Though he found these seven types, Linguists focus on three main categories of them which play a major role in Linguistics, while analysing sentences.
• Let’s discuss those with appropriate examples.

Lexical Ambiguity:

Lexical Ambiguity: Any ambiguity resulting from the ambiguity of a word which has multiple parts of speech.

Example 1: I need a pen to pen a poem. In this example the word “pen” is used twice but with two different meaning and parts of speech, which is ambiguous. Thus this is a vital example of Lexical Ambiguity.

Example 2: The fisherman went to the bank. Here, the word “bank” is ambiguous, which may mean a building or the edge of the river.

Example 3: She looked at the ball happily. The word “ball” has two meanings:

1.Normal cricket ball

2.Party or a gathering.

Polysemy and Homonymy are the types in Lexical Ambiguity.

Syntactic or structural ambiguity:

Structural or syntactic 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 and unconnected.

Example 1: Old men and women- Two possible meanings:

1.All old men and young women.

2.All old men and old women.

Example 2: John saw the boy with telescope. Two possible meanings:

1.John saw the boy through his telescope.

2.John saw the boy who was holding the telescope.

Semantic Ambiguity:

Semantics is nothing but “Meaning”. If a word or phrase is Ambiguous in its meaning then we call it as Semantic Ambiguity. That is even after the syntax and the meanings of the individual words have been resolved, there are two ways of reading the sentence.

Example 1: I saw Rachel with Glasses on her hand. This may give arise to two meanings:

1.“Glasses”- Eye glasses

2.Glass with beer or wine.

Example 2: John and Mary are married. Two possible interpretations:

Are they married each other? Or Separately?

To avoid these kinds of unnecessary ambiguities we may instead be plain and clear like the following:

“John and Mary got engaged last month. Now, John and Mary are married.”

Thus these are the major types of Ambiguity, where the other types that Linguists and other schools argue could be exhausted.

 The advantage of ambiguity

Cognitive scientists develop a new take on an old problem: why human language has so many words with multiple meanings.

Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious — as a way for individuals to exchange information — linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years. Many prominent linguists, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in fact, poorly designed for communication. Such a use, they say, is merely a by-product of a system that probably evolved for other reasons — perhaps for structuring our own private thoughts.

As evident, these linguists point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information between a speaker and a listener, they argue, each word would have just one meaning, eliminating any chance of confusion or misunderstanding. Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head. In a new theory, they claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

“Various people have said that ambiguity is a problem for communication,” says Ted Gibson, an MIT professor of cognitive science and senior author of a paper describing the research to appear in the journal Cognition. “But the fact that context disambiguates has important ramifications for the re-use of potentially ambiguous forms. Ambiguity is no longer a problem — it’s something that you can take advantage of, because you can reuse easy [words] in different contexts over and over again.”

What do you ‘mean’?

For a somewhat ironic example of ambiguity, consider the word “mean.” It can mean, of course, to indicate or signify, but it can also refer to an intention or purpose (“I meant to go to the store”); something offensive or nasty; or the mathematical average of a set of numbers. Adding an‘s’ introduces even more potential definitions: an instrument or method (“a means to an end”), or financial resources (“to live within one’s means”).

But virtually no speaker of English gets confused when he or she hears the word “mean.” That’s because the different senses of the word occur in such different contexts as to allow listeners to infer its meaning nearly automatically.

Given the disambiguating power of context, the researchers hypothesized that languages might harness ambiguity to reuse words — most likely, the easiest words for language processing systems. Building on observation and previous studies, they posited that words with fewer syllables, high frequency and the simplest pronunciations should have the most meanings.

To test this prediction, Piantadosi, Tily and Gibson carried out corpus studies of English, Dutch and German. (In linguistics, a corpus is a large body of samples of language as it is used naturally, which can be used to search for word frequencies or patterns.) By comparing certain properties of words to their numbers of meanings, the researchers confirmed their suspicion that shorter, more frequent words, as well as those that conform to the language’s typical sound patterns, are most likely to be ambiguous — trends that were statistically significant in all three languages.

To understand why ambiguity makes a language more efficient rather than less so, think about the competing desires of the speaker and the listener. The speaker is interested in conveying as much as possible with the fewest possible words, while the listener is aiming to get a complete and specific understanding of what the speaker is trying to say. But as the researchers write, it is “cognitively cheaper” to have the listener infer certain things from the context than to have the speaker spend time on longer and more complicated utterances. The result is a system that skews toward ambiguity, reusing the “easiest” words. Once context is considered, it’s clear that “ambiguity is actually something you would want in the communication system,” Piantadosi says.

“You would expect that since languages are constantly changing, they would evolve to get rid of ambiguity,” Wasow says. “But if you look at natural languages, they are massively ambiguous: Words have multiple meanings; there are multiple ways to parse strings of words. Thus Ambiguity is advantageous while communicating, in one sense.

Now let’s see how ambiguity plays a significant role in Literature.

Function &Significance of Ambiguity in Literature

Ambiguity in literature serves the purpose of lending a deeper meaning to a literary work. By introducing ambiguity in their works, writers give liberty to the readers to use their imagination to explore meanings. This active participation of the readers involves them in the prose or poetry they read.

Ambiguity can be a powerful tool in literature when an author uses it intentionally. Ambiguous situations can force the reader to decide what happens in a story for him- or herself. This decision about which interpretation to choose thus reflects on the reader’s own psychology.

If a reader is an optimistic person, for example, she or he might decide that things ended well, or if the reader has recently gone through a bad breakup he or she might decide that a betrayal was intentional rather than accidental. Authors sometimes write ambiguous endings in their books precisely to create situations that ask the reader to bring their own experience to bear to decide what happened.

Many philosophers have explored the nature of ambiguity, and have concluded that it is an inevitable part of human existence. Psychologists have also researched how people deal with and tolerate ambiguity; being able to tolerate ambiguity seems to be an important element for creativity and being open-minded. Thus, while ambiguity can occur at the sentence level in literature, the ambiguity presented in characters’ motivations and in plot lines can be important to help readers develop their own tolerance for it and thus their psychological well- being.

In literature, authors purposely make use of ambiguity to make their writing complex, interesting, and even true to life. After all, talking about literature is much more fun when there’s room for different interpretations.

In literature and rhetoric, ambiguity can be a useful tool. Groucho Marx’s classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humour, for example: “Last night I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas, I’ll never know”.

Songs and poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the song title “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (where “blue” can refer to the color, or to sadness).

In narrative, ambiguity can be introduced in several ways: motive, plot, character. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the latter type of ambiguity with notable effect in his novel The Great Gatsby.

Examples of Ambiguity in Literature

Example #1:

“Her right arm lay on the cushioned parapet before her. She raised her hand, and made a slight, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw her. Every eye but his was fixed on the man in the arena.

He turned, and with a firm and rapid step he walked across the empty space. Every heart stopped beating, every breath was held, and every eye was fixed immovably upon that man. Without the slightest hesitation, he went to the door on the right, and opened it.”

(“The Lady, or the Tiger?” by Frank R. Stockton)

This is a famous example of ambiguity in literature; Stockton’s short story ends at this point when a man has either chosen a door behind which waits a tiger or a beautiful woman. His lover, the princess, has indicated which door he should choose, but it’s up to the reader to decide if she wants him alive and married to another woman, or is jealous enough to prefer his death.

Example#2:

I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes… (Ulysses by James Joyce)

This excerpt is one of many examples of ambiguity in James Joyce’s classic Ulysses. Molly Bloom is thinking many different thoughts and remembering different events here and ultimately agrees to Leopold’s marriage proposal. However, in her stream of consciousness there is some ambiguity about the person and/or people the different masculine pronouns refer to. They may refer to Leopold, or to other previous lovers.

Example#3:

We find ambiguity in the first line of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,”

The use of word “still” is ambiguous in nature. “Still” here may mean “an unmoving object” or it may be interpreted as “yet unchanged”.

Example#4:

The short story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway is notoriously ambiguous. What exactly is the couple talking about? What will happen to them? The fact that we don’t know everything about the characters pulls us into the story and drives us to dig deeper, push harder, and get more out of the whole shebang.

Other notoriously ambiguous books and stories? Henry James‘s “The Beast in the Jungle” and the ending of Kate Chopin‘s The Awakening.

Ambiguity and Linguistics:

Ambiguity, as I mentioned earlier serves a greater importance in Linguistics, especially in one of the four major wings, Semantics.

In Linguistics, When we analyze a poem or a discourse we generally look for literary devices which add up to the quality of the discourse…such as Irony, Pun, Ambiguity etc… Moreover, IC [Immediate Constituent] analysis is specially used to disambiguate sentences, so that we could get a better understanding of the discourse/ text.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNOpclZ2P0Y
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PATIKE2c8kE

Watch these video lectures to learn in detail about IC analysis and the rules of IC analysis and how it works in disambiguating ambiguous sentences.

Conclusion/ Summary:

Thus Ambiguity is a vast area in Linguistics, which has many types according to many critics and schools. But all those could be exhausted in the three discussed above. Those are:

Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Ambiguity.

Lexical: Any ambiguity resulting from the ambiguity of a word which has multiple parts of speech.

Syntactic: Structural or syntactic 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 and unconnected.

Semantic: Semantics is nothing but “Meaning”. If a word or phrase is Ambiguous in its meaning then we call it as Semantic Ambiguity. That is even after the syntax and the meanings of the individual words have been resolved, there are two ways of reading the sentence.

And as it was discussed above, Ambiguity is much helpful in Language and literature, which in literature is used by the author with an intention to grasp the readers towards the text.

Also look at the videos above to learn much about IC analysis and its role in Linguistics. Thus, everything in the creation has both positive and negative side. So does Ambiguity. It depends on the context in which it is used.

References:

• Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. USA: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.
• Empson, William. Seven types of Ambiguity. USA: New Directions, 1930. Print.
• Winkler, Sussane. Ambiguity: Language and Communication. Berlin/Munich/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG., 2015. Print.
• Yule, George. The Study of Language.UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Print.
• https://www.enotes.com/topics/seven-types-ambiguity
• https://literarydevices.net/ambiguity/
• https://www.spellingcity.com/homophones-and-homonyms.html
• http://news.mit.edu/2012/ambiguity-in-language-0119
• https://www.thoughtco.com/polysemy-words-and-meanings-1691642
• http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s06/readings/gillon90.pdf