Ambiguity of Senses Chapter 5

Ambiguity of Senses

• A word or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one sense.
• Examples of ambiguous words:
  • Bank (land alongside the river or financial establishment)
  • Fifteenth (a fraction or a position)
  • Fight (to engage in combat or a boxing match)
  • File (to store documents or a tool for sharpening)
  • Will (determination or a legal document)
  • Fire (to set ablaze or to dismiss someone)
  • Firm (strong or a company)
  • Pupil (a student or the eye's pupil)
  • Honeymoon (a vacation or a period of happiness)
  • Side (to support or a direction)

Types of Word Ambiguity

• Homonymy: a case of a word having two senses or more with no relation between them.
  • Examples: pen (writing instrument or enclosure), file (document storage or tool), term (school period or meaning), steer (cattle or to direct), moment (time or physics concept), craft (skill or boat), kind (type or generous), type (category or to write)
• Polysemy: a case of a word having two senses or more that are related to each other.
  • Examples: chair (furniture or to preside), father (parent or to adopt), fat (dietary or a full purse), civil (engineering or polite), canary (bird or yellow color), blank (unsigned or erased), alloy (metal mixture or to combine), depression (mental health or economic downturn), mend (to repair or to give more fuel), live (electricity or television broadcast)

Homonymy and Synonymy

• Homonymy: a case of a word having two senses or more.
• Synonymy: a case where two different words have the same sense.
• Homonymy involves one word, while synonymy involves two words.

Accounting for Polysemy and Homonymy

• Reasons why words have more than one sense:
  • Economy: using one word to convey multiple meanings
  • Coincidence: words developing multiple meanings over time
  • Noun-verb function: words having different meanings as nouns or verbs
  • Transitive-Intransitive: words having different meanings based on their grammatical function

Sentence Ambiguity

• Types of sentence ambiguity:
  • Lexical ambiguity: ambiguity caused by an ambiguous word
  • Grammatical ambiguity: ambiguity caused by sentence structure
• Examples of sentence ambiguity:
  • "Please, give me the file." (ambiguous word "file")
  • "The pupil needs some care." (ambiguous word "pupil")
  • "Visiting relatives can be boring." (ambiguous sentence structure)
  • "He ate five apples and oranges." (ambiguous sentence structure)

Word Ambiguity and Sentence Ambiguity

• Relationship between word ambiguity and sentence ambiguity:
  • Word ambiguity can cause sentence ambiguity
  • Word ambiguity may not cause sentence ambiguity
  • Sentence ambiguity can exist without word ambiguity
  • Ambiguous words do not always make ambiguous sentences

Grammatical Ambiguity

• Types of grammatical ambiguity:
  • And structure: ambiguous meaning of "and" in a sentence
  • Prepositional phrase structure: ambiguous meaning of a prepositional phrase
  • Verb voice: ambiguous meaning of verb voice (active or passive)
  • The (ing form): ambiguous meaning of the "-ing" form
  • Possessive form: ambiguous meaning of possessive pronouns
  • Or structure: ambiguous meaning of "or" in a sentence
  • Premodification structure: ambiguous meaning of modifiers in a sentence