AMBIGUITY AND EXAMPLES FORM ALICES ADVENTURE IN WONDERLAND

HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Ambiguity and Examples form Alices adventure in wonderland SEMANTICS FINAL ASSIGNMENT Name Lê Thị Nhung Course K18C Instructor Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm Deadline 2862010 Hà Nội, năm 2010 TABLE OF CONTENT I INTRODUCTION 2 II DEVELOPMENT 3 1 WHAT IS AMBIGUITY? WHEN DOES IT ARISE? 3 1 1 Ambiguity Ambiguity vs Vagueness 3 1 2 Cases of Ambiguity 4 2 LEXICAL AMBIGUITY 5 2 1.

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

AMBIGUITY AND EXAMPLES FORM

"ALICE'S ADVENTURE IN WONDERLAND

SEMANTICS FINAL ASSIGNMENT

Name: Lê Thị Nhung Course: K18C

Instructor: Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm Deadline: 28/6/2010

Hà Nội, năm 2010

TABLE OF CONTENT

4 EXAMPLE OF AMBIGUITY IN THE NOVEL "ALICE'S

I INTRODUCTION

Ability to have linguistic communication is one of the outstanding features

of human beings in such a colorful natural world Language can be considered as

the greatest achievement in human evolution, which distinguishes man and animal

Along the magnificent developing progress of sciences throughout thousands and

thousands years, this distinguished feature has proved that it is as complicated as

human beings themselves

At the center of that development, human being has turned the complicated

things into an art, including the art of using language With the personal interest in

linguistic uses, I myself want to find out more about meaning of sentences and

utterances In the process of finding the problem, the attraction of ambiguity

caught my eyes and my mind But in such limited time and capacity, I can only

devote to write such a small review Hopefully the future will bring more chance

for my findings about this problem

II DEVELOPMENT

1 WHAT IS AMBIGUITY? WHEN DOES IT ARISE?

1.1 Ambiguity - Ambiguity vs Vagueness

Cann (1993) stated that: "A sentence is said to be ambiguous whenever it

can associated with two or more different meanings." In other words, ambiguity is

the property of being ambiguous, where a word, term, notation, sign, symbol,

phrase, sentence, or any other form used for communication, is called ambiguous

if it can be interpreted in more than one way Ambiguity is different from

vagueness, which arises when the boundaries of meaning are indistinct Ambiguity

is context-dependent: the same linguistic item (be it a word, phrase, or sentence)

may be ambiguous in one context and unambiguous in another context For a

word, ambiguity typically refers to an unclear choice between different definitions

as may be found in a dictionary A sentence may be ambiguous due to different

ways of parsing the same sequence of words

Ambiguity is to be distinguished from vagueness According to Quine

(1960:29), "vague terms are only dubiously applicable to marginal objects, but an

ambiguous term such as "light" may be at once clearly true of various objects

(such as dark feathers) and clearly false of them." A term is vague if and only if

there are cases in which it is unclear whether or not the term applies A vague term

is not ambiguous as far as it fails to have two or more distinct meanings, however,

many terms are both vague and ambiguous A term is vague just in case there are

cases in which it is unclear whether or not the term applies In other case, some

term is vague because there are borderline areas in a continuum, where it is

unclear whether or not the term applies

E.g., “little,” “close,” “new,” “young,” “fat,” “wealthy,” “thick” and many

color terms

Take “young.” Teenagers are young 50 year-old men are not young But

are 30 year-old men young?

Other term is vague because there are several criteria for application of the

term with no standard of how many of the criteria need be fulfilled and to what

degree

E.g., “philosophy,” “religious (person),” “resident,” “adult” and “tree.”

1.2 Cases of Ambiguity

Ambiguity comes in two different forms: Lexical and grammatical

ambiguity When it comes to the ascription of multiple meanings to single words,

lexical ambiguity arises while grammatical ambiguity is the assignment of

different syntactic structures to a sentence

For example: (1) She has gone out, to the bank

(2) The strike was called by lecturers who are radical and by students

The first source of ambiguity occurs where an expression is associated with

two or more unrelated meanings, as in (1) where word "bank" may be interpreted

as "an organization where people and businesses can invest or borrow money,

change it to foreign money, etc or a building where these services are offered"

(Cambridge advanced learners' dictionary) a or as the "sloping raised land,

especially along the sides of a river Lexemes whose word forms have this

property are called homonyms, which will be discussed more detailed later

A more interesting source of ambiguity from the point of view of the formal

semanticist is illustrated in (2) Here the ambiguity results from the possibility of

assigning two or more syntactic structures to a single grammatical string of words

To ascertain the meaning of (2), for example, it is necessary to know whether the

adjective radical modifies the nominal phrase, lecturers and students, in which

case both the lecturers and the students who called the strike are radical, or

whether it modifies just the noun lecturers, in which case the lecturers who called

the strike are said to be radical but the political attitude of the students who did so

is not specified

Ambiguity may arise when a distinction is not made between the use and

the mentioning of a word or phrase

Example: Tom said I was angry

Tom said, “I was angry.”

The two sentences express two very different things even though the words are the

same This occurs because the phrase “I was angry” is being used in the first case

and mentioned in the second Or the example of "Paddy is Irish" is ambiguous

whether Paddy refers to a person or the name

2 LEXICAL AMBIGUITY

Lexical ambiguity, as mentioned above, arises when a word or a phrase

could, in the context of a particular sentence, refer to two more properties or

things, typically caused by homonymy and polysemy Homonymy refers to a

situation where different words happens accidentally to have the same forms while

polysemy designates a situation in which a single word has a set of related

meanings.(Hoa, 2004:68)

2.1 Homonymy

Homonymy can be subdivided into homophones, where the forms of

lexeme sound the same but written differently, e.g draft and draught which can

both be represented phonemically as /draft/, and homographs, e.g lead, which are

written the same, but which are pronounced differently Some lexemes are both

homonyms (like bank, punch), where all of the lexeme's associated word forms are

phonetically or orthographically identical, and partial homonyms (like find,

found), where just some of its word forms are identical Lyons (1996:56) takes the

example:

They found hospitals and charitable institutions

He argues that because "found" and "find" are transitive verbs and both can

take the noun phrase "hospitals and charitable institutions" as direct object, which

makes the sentence not only grammatically but also semantically acceptable

The ambiguity here is partly lexical and partly grammatical It is lexically

ambiguous because its ambiguity depends up on a difference in the lexical

meaning of the two partially homonymous lexemes "found" and "find" It is

grammatically ambiguous in because its ambiguity depends upon the grammatical

non-equivalence of these two words To eliminate the ambiguity, we can

manipulate the grammatical environment in such ways as:

They have found hospitals and charitable institutions

She/he found hospitals and charitable institutions

They founded hospitals and charitable institutions

Besides, it is quite possible for the partial homonymy rarely or never result

in ambiguity For example:

Last week, I went out with some friends

Concrete will last longer

The form "last" is almost always grammatically identifiable when it occurs

in a sentence or context

2.2 Polysemy

Homonymy is often contrasted with polysemy "A polysemous lexeme is

one the is interpreted as having multiple senses that are not entirely distinct, as is

the case in the standard examples of homonyms."(Cann, 1993:8) The classic

example of a polyseme in English is the lexeme Mouth which has different

interpretations depending on what sort of entity is described as having a mouth

There are, for example, human mouths, mouths of caves, mouths of bottles,

mouths of rivers, and so on In each of these cases, the properties of the entity

described by mouth are different but not absolutely different, as each one refers to

an opening of some sort The difference between homonymy and polysemy is one

of degree, and precise definitions of these terms are difficult and controversial

Hughes and Lavery (2004:65) considers a broader term "referential

ambiguity and gives the example:

Pavavrotti is a big opera start

He argues that the ambiguity arises since "big" may refers to either "fat" or

"famous" There is another type of referential ambiguity that deserves special

mention: collective and distributive use of term Nouns which refer to a each

member class of individual object, like dog for the class consisting of all dogs, are

distributively used In contrast, nouns used to say about the whole class is

collectively used He gives the example:

Our university has a large wrestling team

If the term "wrestling team" is distributively interpreted, the statement

means that the individual members of the team are large If it is collectively

interpreted, the statement means that the team has a large number of member

The context plays an important role in avoiding misunderstanding, but

sometimes it cannot complete that mission More example can be listed as

followed:

Tom gave Ted's skis to his sister

Harold told me that he would do it next week

Americans make more telephone calls than Canadians

The government has provided constant finding for post-secondary

education over last three years

3 GRAMMATICAL AMBIGUITY

According to Matthews (2000), grammatical ambiguity refers to ambiguity

explained by differences in syntax E.g I read the book on the floor might mean

that a book was on the floor and that was the one the speaker read: this would

reflect a syntactic construction in which on the floor modifies book Alternatively,

it might mean that the speaker was on the floor while reading the book: this would

reflect a construction in which on the floor modifies read or read the book It is

also called ‘constructional homonymy’

Grammatical ambiguity arises when the grammatical structure of a sentence

allows two interpretations, each of which gives rise to a different meaning Hughes

and Lavery (2004) use a sentence from news report in England to illustrate:

Lord Denning spoke against the artificial insemination of women in the

House of Lord

They argue that the grammar makes it unclear whether it was the speech or

the insemination that took place in the House of Lords This is because the phrase

"in the House of Lords could modify either "insemination" or "spoke" There are

also other examples to consider:

(3) The bully hit the boy with the snow ball

(4) We need more intelligent leaders

Example (1) can be interpreted into:

(3a) The bully threw a snowball at the boy

(3b) The bully hit a boy who was holding a snowball

Example (4) can be interpreted into:

(4a) We need a greater number of intelligent leaders

(4b) We need the leaders who are smarter

Back to the example number (2), the problem of which noun is modified

turns out to be clearer The sentence can be interpreted as followed:

(2a) The strike was called by lecturers who are radical and by students

(2b) The strike was called by lecturers who are radical and by students who

are radical

In the above example, what is at issue is the scope of the adjective, radical In

(2a), it modifies and thus has scope over, the noun lecturers, why in (2b) its scope

is the nominal phrase lecturers and students Scope is an important concept in

semantics and primary source of ambiguity, which involves not only adjectives,

but also conjunctions, like and, or, etc and quantifiers, like every, all, and some in

English Structural ambiguity of this sort thus has it source in the syntax of

language However, there are other scope ambiguities that do not directly depend

on syntactic structure of a sentence Such ambiguity usually involves negation

(not), quantification (every, some) and other elements like tense, which do not

vary their syntactic position according to the reading of the sentence Example:

(3) Every politician loves a cause

The two readings here can be made clear by those:

(3a) Every politician loves a cause and that is their own career

(3b) Every good politician loves a cause and each one loves a cause that everyone else loathes

In (3a), there is only one cause that every good politician love a different

cause The sentence in (3b), however, is usually only assigned a single surface

constituent structure, so that this ambiguity cannot be directly attributed to a

syntactic source and is referred to as a semantic scope ambiguity

An adequate semantic theory must be able to predict where structural

ambiguity is likely to arise in a language and provide a means of differentiating

the interpretations of the different structures to an ambiguous sentence by the

grammar, where this is relevant It should also ensure that sentences that have two

(or more) syntactic derivations, but only one semantic interpretation, are not

assigned more than one meaning The theory should also provide an account of

scope ambiguities where these are not reflected in syntactic derivations, and be

able to differentiate the scopes of particular expressions independently of syntax

Three simple examples will illustrate some different types of scope

ambiguity and their representation in an informal first order predicate logic, using

restrictions on quantifiers and an infix notation for sentential formulas The

meanings of the different interpretations should be clear The example of Sven

Hurum (1988): "John didn’t meet Jane or Mary" can be made clearer as: "John

didn't meet either Jane or Mary" or that he didn't meet at least one of them

4 EXAMPLE OF AMBIGUITY IN THE NOVEL "ALICE'S ADVENTURE IN WONDERLAND"

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in

Wonderland) is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge

Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll Stand in BBC's Greatest English

Books list, it tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into

a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures The tale

plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as

well as children It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary

nonsense genre, and its narrative course and structure have been enormously

influential, especially in the fantasy genre

Throughout the story, the art of writing by Lewis Carroll is both

comprehensive and interesting, leads the reader in to a real wonderland of the

language Ambiguity here is among his most frequent uses

In the situation where Alice and everyone (the mouse and other animals) are

totally wet (in the pool of tears), they need to get dry quickly, but the term "dry"

the mouse mention means "boring"