 Hi, this e-lecture is all about ambiguity. Ambiguity is a phenomenon where an expression can have two or more distinct meanings, and it is pervasive at all levels of the linguistic system. However, the ambiguity usually disappears if the potentially ambiguous expression appears in an appropriate context, which allows one of its meanings to be automatically selected. In fact, alternative readings, which would be preferred in other contexts, may not even come to mind. This e-lecture lists and discusses the various types of ambiguity. So let's start with some examples. Natural language utterances may involve some or several of the following types of ambiguity. For example, lexical ambiguity. Here the example glasses may denote two different things, the cutlery or the vision tool. Or take the case of structural ambiguity as in she is an English teacher. Now, is she a teacher who teaches English or is she a teacher who comes from England? Or take this case of referential ambiguity as in Mary loves her boyfriend. Now, who does she love? Her own boyfriend or another girl's boyfriend? We don't know. A classic case of scope ambiguity can be seen in these examples, which denotes the fact that four students have shot three professors. Well, what a sentence. But who shot who? Did all four students shoot three professors at the same time or all together? We cannot tell, but we will discuss this case. And the last example I would like to discuss with you later on is referred to as pragmatic ambiguity. In sentences or utterances such as I'll be there on Sunday, you can understand this as a threat or as a promise. Well, let's wait and see. Let's now look at these ambiguity types in detail and let's start with lexical ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity occurs at the level of the lexical items of a language. Whether same phonetic or written word form represents items of different syntactic categories with different meanings or a lexical item of a certain category has multiple senses. Traditionally, two types of lexical ambiguity are distinguished. On the one hand, we have cases where several lexemes have the same form but unrelated senses. Swallow can have two interpretations, the verb and the bird and give me a ring. Well, in one case it is a telephone ring or in the other it is a ring that you wear on your finger. Such cases are generally referred to as homonymy. A different case occurs when lexical items have acquired different but related senses. For example, in the first case, you have the neck of a bottle and the human neck. In the other case, the face of a clock or the human face. Such cases are referred to as polysemy. Let's discuss them in detail. Now the first is homonymy. Homonymy, and that is something I should start off with, should never be mixed up with hyponymy. Hyponymy is a sense relation of inclusion, a hierarchical relation where ant, fly and bee are included in insect. So here we have hyponyms and hyperonyms, something completely different. So do not mix up hyponymy with homonymy. Homonymy is a relation between two or more separate lexical items which have the same form but different unrelated meanings. The items called homonyms may have the same phonetic or written form or both. Well, let's look at these phenomena in detail. For example, we may have homophones. Homophones have the same pronunciation but different spellings, as in male, the human attribute, or male, the male you send around. Homophones. Homographs, by contrast, are homonyms which are written in the same way. That is, they have the same spelling but different pronunciations, as in tear, the tear drop, or tear if you tear something apart. Well, and then we may have complete homonyms, such as bank, where you have the money institute and the river embankment, same spelling, same pronunciation. Apart from being semantically unrelated, homonyms also differ etymologically. In the case we showed earlier on, swallow, we may have identical forms with different historical origins. They are treated as homonymous and are given separate entries in a dictionary. Swallow is our example. In Old English, swellran, we find the verbal origin, and in Old English, swallaba, we find the nominal origin, swallow, as a bird. Whereas, homonymy is a relation that holds between two or more separate lexical items. Polissomy, often referred to as multiple meaning, is a property of single lexemes with several senses. The senses are called polysemes. For example, the lexeme face we saw earlier on with its different interpretations, the face of a clock, the human face, and so on. The meanings of a polysemous expression are related in various ways to one another. Among them we have relationships such as metonymy in cases such as he has a large bank account versus he married a large bank account where the name of an attribute stands for the name of the thing itself. Or we may have metaphoric extensions, metaphors, where, for example, the item position refers to something it does not literally denote as in a good position to watch versus a good position at our university. So we have different senses, metaphoric extensions, polysemes. While homonymy and polysomy are theoretically clearly defined in practice, the distinction between them is not always easy to make. For example, historical facts which we cannot easily understand may contradict speakers' intuitions about the relatedness or non-relatedness of senses. Let's now turn our attention to structural ambiguity. Structural ambiguity is basically a question of what goes with what. So if you take a simple constituent structure, you can ask the question, now where do we have to put the other branch here or there or maybe even elsewhere? So we have several options and constituents can relate to each other in different ways, even though none of the individual items may be ambiguous at all. So let us look at some examples. The first example here shows that complex compounds can have different interpretations. The compound porcelain egg container can be interpreted in two ways depending on its structural hierarchy. On the one hand, we can have a container for porcelain eggs. So something like this where container is the head of the compound. Porcelain egg container and is an isolated head of a compound. It's a container. A second interpretation, now here we have an egg container which is made of porcelain. And you can clearly see the different constituent or morphological structure of these two compounds. More common examples of structural ambiguity occur at the level of phrases and sentences. Take old men and women as an example. This complex noun phrase has two interpretations. On the one hand, you can have old men and women of any age. So this would be the constituent structure where old is a specifier of men but not of women. So only the men are old, the women can be young or old, we don't know. The second interpretation which looks like this says that now everyone is old because now old is a modifier of the entire coordinate noun phrase. So here both the men and the women are old. In present day English three central triggers for structural ambiguity can be identified at the level of sentences and phrases. That is the potential contexts. For example we have cases of coordination which we've already seen here. Coordination of noun phrases for example. We may find prepositional phrases or more general adverbials that can be attached in several ways to several other categories. We will discuss that in a second. And we have non-finite clauses in English. For example, gerunds which can be interpreted in two ways. Let us look at the latter two in detail. Here you see a structural analysis of the admittedly trivial sentence John saw Mary. I used an abridged version of the X bar syntax scheme. Let us now add the adverbial in the park. We have two different structural options of prepositional phrase attachment. If we attach this prepositional phrase to verb bar then the act of seeing took place in the park. Because now the prepositional phrase is not included in the noun phrase. It is part of the verb phrase. So in other words John must have been in the park when he saw Mary. If we attach in the park to the N bar node which is part of the NP Mary. Then Mary must have been in the park and the act of seeing is not specified as far as its location is concerned. In other words, Mary must have been in the park. The same happens if we replace the prepositional phrase by an adverbial phrase outside. For example, John saw Mary outside. In this case John must have been outside. The seeing took place outside. The second interpretation now here. Mary must have certainly been outside. In non-finite clauses such as the chickens are ready to eat, we can also have structural ambiguity effects. For example, this can mean that the chickens are ready for the chickens to eat something. In other words, the chickens themselves want to eat something. The second interpretation is completely different. Now here the subordinate clause has the chickens as the object of the eating. In other words, someone signaled by pro wants to eat the chickens. Or take this sentence here. The shooting of the hunters upset me. Interpretation one. The hunters shot someone or shoot someone. This is what upsets me. In other words, the fact that the hunters shoot upsets me. And in the second case, the fact that someone, pro, shot or shoots the hunters upsets me. Or think about the famous gerund construction. Flying planes can be dangerous. One of Chomsky's early examples in 1957 where you can analyze flying as an adjective or as a non-finite clause. So especially non-finite constructions as well as adverbials create structural ambiguity effects. Completely different type of ambiguity is referred to as referential ambiguity. The interpretation of sentences also depends on the referential properties of the words and constructions contained in them. Referential ambiguity arises when a word, mostly a pronoun, can refer to more than one entity in the same sentence or to another sentence or to another item in the world. In our example, John kissed his girlfriend. It is not clear, well, who did he kiss? His own girlfriend or the girlfriend of someone else? Hmm, we don't know. And if we add the reduced construction and so did Bill. Well, the situation is equally weird. Bill can have kissed his own girlfriend or someone else's girlfriend. Let's now look at scope ambiguity. Scope ambiguity may occur in constructions with at least two numerals or quantifiers. Where one can be placed within the scope of the other in different ways. Here is an example, however, it is unambiguous. One student has a car. With quantifiers larger than one, this sentence, however, becomes ambiguous. And the meaning is no longer clear. Do both students have a total of two cars? Or does each student have their own two cars? Hmm, we cannot tell. Because this type of ambiguity arises from the relation between numerals or between quantifiers, scope ambiguity is not lexical but structural in nature. However, only a single constituent structure is involved. Let us illustrate this. The sentence, every child likes a book has an unambiguous constituent structure. Nevertheless, it has two interpretations that do not affect the constituent structure at all. So these occur at the non-syntactic level and can be described using predicate logic. Our sentence, every child likes a book involves two one-place predicates. Child and book. So, for example, we have children such as John, Linda, Paul, Susan, and we have books such as Peter Pan's Cinderella, Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, and so on and so forth. The question arises, do all children like the same book? Or do they just like some book out of the set of books listed here? So we have two interpretations. In the first interpretation, every child likes the same book. The universal quantifier all falls into the scope of the existential quantifier. Which means there is at least one element, y, that is, book, such that for all x, the children, it holds. If y is a book and x is a child, then x, the child, likes this particular book. And in our case, we have constructed the meaning in such a way that all children like the same book, namely, in our case, we picked Treasure Island. If we reverse the order of the quantifiers, we get the interpretation, every child likes some book. And now the interpretation is for all x, that is, for all children, it holds, that there is at least one y, one book, such that if x is a child, then y is a book and x likes y. And in our case, we have indicated that over here, where we, for example, illustrate that John likes Treasure Island, Paul likes Peter Pan, Linda likes the Jungle Book, and so on and so forth. I think this example nicely illustrates the effect of quantification on scope ambiguity. And it also illustrates that this is not a syntactic type of ambiguity. Last but not least, let's talk about pragmatic ambiguity, which occurs if any specific context, a given utterance, has one interpretation and in a different context another. The context includes the situation in which the utterance is produced and the participants, that is, speaker and hearer. Thus, pragmatic ambiguity arises when language is put to use. For example, speakers may use the same utterance to perform different speech acts in different contexts. Here are two examples. Do you have a life insurance can be understood as an offer to sign a life insurance, a request, or a threat? I've got plans for you may be interpreted as a promise, as a statement, and again as a threat. Generally, it is debatable whether the examples presented here actually exhibit ambiguity or merely show the context dependence of interpretations. Anyway, so much for ambiguity. I hope to have outlined the essential principles of ambiguity. That is the phenomenon that an expression has two or more distinct meaning. Lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, referential ambiguity, scope ambiguity, and pragmatic ambiguity. A second phenomenon that allows us to assign different interpretations to an expression is referred to as vagueness. In an additional e-lecture, we will discuss the central types of vagueness and will also introduce the test that allows us to differentiate the two phenomena, ambiguity and vagueness, from one another. So, until then, see you.