Ambiguity

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Ambiguity Summary

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Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

ambiguity

In natural languages, property of expressions that can be interpreted in several ways, or, rather, that can be multiply specified in linguistic description from lexical, semantic, syntactic, and other aspects. In this sense, ambiguity is different from the complementary term vagueness as a designation for pragmatic ambiguousness or indeterminacy, which cannot be systematically described. Ambiguity can be resolved or represented (a) by the competent speaker, who can clarify the different readings with the help of paraphrases, (b) by grammatical analysis, for instance, within the framework of generative syntax models, which accord each possible interpretation of ambiguous surface structures different underlying structures ( disambiguation). Depending on whether ambiguity results from the use of specific lexemes or from the syntactic structure of complex expressions, a distinction is drawn between (a) lexical ambiguity (also polysemy, homonymy) and (b) syntactic ambiguity (also polysyntacticity, constructional homonymy). The representation and resolution of ambiguity by multiple interpretation is considered to be the most important criterion for the evaluation of the efficacy of grammars, especially as the occurrence of ambiguity plays a decisive part in numerous linguistic problems of description, as, for example, in quantifiers, negation, pronominalization ( personal pronoun), as well as in word formation. In everyday communication, ambiguity is a rather marginal problem, as context, intonation, situation, etc. usually sift out the adequate reading.