2. Ex. 1
• The comedian Dick Gregory tells of
walking up to a lunch counter in
Mississippi during the days of racial
segregation. The waitress said to him, “We
don’t serve colored people.” “That’s fine,”
he replied, “I don’t eat colored people. I’d
like a piece of chicken.” (Quoted by
Pinker, 1994)
3. Ex. 2
• In the movie Animal Crackers Groucho
Marx says, “I once shot an elephant in my
pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I’ll
never know.” (Quoted by Pinker, 1994)
4. Introduction
• Ambiguity, having more than one meaning, may be a
result of syntax or of semantics.
• Semantic ambiguity depends on the meaning of a
word or words which themselves can be
misinterpreted.
• Syntactic ambiguity means that the grammatical
construction of the phrase or sentence brings about
the misinterpretation - the word order or the fact that
a word could be either a noun or a verb, for example.
• Metaphorical ambiguity occurs where the metaphor is
taken literally – eg.
“Walls have ears"
5. Can you understand these sentences?
• Fat people eat accumulates.
• The cotton clothing is usually made of grows
in Mississippi.
• The girl told the story cried.
• I convinced her children are noisy.
• I know the words to that song about the
queen don't rhyme.
6. • (The) fat that people eat accumulates (in their
bodies).
• The cotton (that) clothing is usually made of
grows in Mississippi.
• The girl (who was) told the story cried.
• I convinced her (that) children are noisy.
• I know (that) the words to that song about the
queen don't rhyme.
7. These are real newspaper headlines:
• KIDS MAKE NUTRITIOUS SNACKS
• GRANDMOTHER OF EIGHT
MAKES HOLE IN ONE
• MILK DRINKERS ARE TURNING
TO POWDER
• DRUNK GETS NINE MONTHS IN
VIOLIN CASE
8. Ambiguity
• A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has
more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for
example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark.
• A word or sentence is ambiguous when it has more
than one sense
• We saw her duck - we saw her lower her head or we
saw the duck belonging to her.
• Lexical ambiguity stems from the existence of
homophony and polysemy. For example the word
bank can be used to denote either a place where
monetary exchange and handling takes place or the
bank of the river.
9. • Put the box on the table by the window in the
kitchen is an ambiguous sentence. It could mean
any of the following:
• Put the box onto the table that is by the window in
the kitchen.
• Take the box that is on the table and put it by the
window in the kitchen.
• Take the box off the table that is by the window
and put it in the kitchen.
• To understand the first and third meanings, it may
be helpful to imagine that in the kitchen there are
two tables: one by the window and one not.
10. • Other example of homophony:
• This can is made of tin.
• Put the left-overs in the cookie tin.
• Anne went to Mexico and got a tan.
• My favourite jacket is black with a tan
collar.
11. Polysemy occurs when a word, or small group of
words, has two or more related meanings
• The sun glared down from the hot desert sky.
• The angry girl glared at the boy who pulled her hair.
• The stars are bright tonight.
• She must be bright if she made an “A” on the test.
12. Homonymy: words which have the same form, but
different meanings.
• It refers to the phenomenon that
words has one form, either in spelling
or in pronunciation, or both, but
more than one unrelated meanings.
These words are called homonyms.
13. Homophones
• When two words are identical in
pronunciation, but different in
spelling and meaning, they are called
homophones.
• Samples:
rain/reign night/knight piece/peace
bare/bear sun/son flour/flower
14. Homographs
• When two words are identical in
spelling, but different in
pronunciation and meaning, they are
homographs.
• Samples:
bow n./bow v. tear n./tear v.
lead n./lead v. close v./close adj.
15. Complete homonyms
• When two words are identical in both
pronunciation and spelling, but
different in meaning, they are called
complete homonyms.
• fast/fast scale/scale bank/bank
pupil/pupil mole/mole
16. Polysemy: word which has several related
senses.
• When a word has two or more
meanings that are related
conceptually or historically, it is said
to be a polysemous or polysemic
word.
• The phenomenon is termed as
polysemy.
17. The distinction between homonymy
and polysemy:
• One indication of the distinction can be found
in the typical dictionary entry for words.
• If a word has two or more meanings
(polysemic), then there will be a single entry,
with a numbered list of the different meanings
of the word.
• If two words are treated as homonyms, they will
typically have two separate entries.
18. Varieties of polysemy
• Homonymy and polysemy are two well-known
semantic problems. Bank in river bank and Bank
of England are homonymous: they share no
meaning whatsoever; they function as two
totally unrelated words. River bed and hospital bed
seem to be somehow semantically linked: it is a
case of polysemy.
• The problems posed by homonymy and
polysemy are probably at the very heart of
semantics: what exactly is it that words may or
may not share ? how come we can mean
different things with the same word.
19. Linear explanation: literal and derived
meaning
According to this point of view, words do possess a
literal meaning, all other meanings are merely
derived and figurative.
For example, the literal meaning of mouse is the rodent;
a derived meaning is the computer mouse.
A bed is "a piece of furniture that you lie on“ (literal); it
is something flat at the bottom of something else (a
river bed) or a place where something can be found
in abundance (a shellfish bed, a bed of roses) in a
figurative way.
20. But literal meanings are not always so easy to
spot.
For example, a position can be a physical position
(a crouched position), a psychological position, a
stand, a point of view (the Soviet position on
German unity), or a social position, a job (his
position as Speaker).
Which one is the literal meaning ? We may be
inclined to think it is the physical sense, but we
are clearly not as sure as with mouse or bed.
21. • There are two types of ambiguity, lexical
and structural. Lexical ambiguity is by far
the more common. Everyday examples
include nouns like 'chip', 'pen' and 'suit',
verbs like 'call', 'draw' and 'run', and
adjectives like 'deep', 'dry' and 'hard'.
• The above examples of ambiguity are each
a case of one word with more than one
meaning.
22. • Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase
or sentence has more than one underlying
structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan
history teacher', 'a student of high moral
principles' and 'short men and women',
and the sentences 'The girl kiss the boy
with a book' and 'Visiting relatives can be
boring'.
23. • These ambiguities are said to be structural
because each such phrase can be represented in
two structurally different ways, e.g., '[Tibetan
history] teacher' and 'Tibetan [history teacher]'.
Indeed, the existence of such ambiguities
provides strong evidence for a level of
underlying syntactic structure.
• Consider the structurally ambiguous sentence,
'The chicken is ready to eat', which could be
used to describe either a hungry chicken or a
broiled chicken.
24. Structural ambiguity
• The policemen observes the lady with the
telescope.
• The prep phrase with the telescope either
modifies the lady (thus, the lady with a
telescope) or observes (thus, the policeman
observes with the help of the telescope)
• An attachment ambiguity - the prep phrase may
be attached to different nodes in the syntactic
structure
25. • Scope ambiguity - the possibility of assuming
different structures in the logical form of a
sentence
• Every man loves a woman.
• Either for each man there is his woman and he
loves her
• Or there is a special woman which is loved by
all the men
• The phrase old men and women is structurally
ambiguous - [old men] and women or old
[men and women]
26. Rule violation in sentence meaning
• Consider these sentences:
a. The hamburger ate man.
b. My cat studied linguistics.
c. A table was listening to some music.
d. Can colourless green ideas sleep furiously?
e. Colourful red umbrellas moved playfully.
• Oddness if these sentences does not derive
from their syntactic structure
• They are well-structured sentences –
syntactically good but semantically odd
27. • For ex. Sentence (e) does not make sense because things
logically cannot be colourless and green simultaneously,
ideas cannot sleep and nothing sleep furiously.
• In sentence (a) the subject of verb ‘ate’ must denote
entities that are capable of eating. Hamburger does not
have this property but man does
• Such sentences are grammatically correct but
semantically anomalous.
• Sentences – (1) both grammatical & meaningful, (2)
ungrammatical &meaningless, (3) grammatical,
meaningless & unacceptable
• One has to ignore metaphorical and figurative
interpretations of sentences. We are dealing with the
strictly literal meanings of predicates.
28. Rule violation in language
• The rules of language are not laws of nature.
• Rules of language are broken everyday by everybody.
• 3 kinds of rule violation:
1. Anomaly (a violation of semantic rules to create
nonsense)
2. Metaphor (non-literal meaning)
- Walls have ears
- My new car is a lemon
3. Idiom (the meaning of an expression may be unrelated
to the meaning its part)
- She puts her foot in her mouth
- Eat your heart out.
29. Anomaly: No sense and nonsense
• Anomaly is semantic oddness as opposed to
grammatical oddness that can be traced to the
meanings of the predicates in the sentence
concerned.
• Thus ‘Christopher is killing phonemes’ is
anomalous because the meanings of the
predicates ‘kill’ and ‘phoneme’ cannot be
combined in this way. Anomaly involves the
violation of a selectional restriction.
• Jack’s courage chewed the bone.
• James sliced the idea.
30. 1. My brother is an only child.e.g
.
2.That bachelor is pregnant.
Bachelor +male while pregnant-male
3. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
“colorless” and “green in color” are
inconsistent.
Above are uninterpretable. One can only
interpret them if one dreams up some
meanings for each “non-sense” word.
31. Semantic anomaly vs grammatical
anomaly
• It is claimed that grammatical anomalies are typically
corrigible in the sense that it is obvious what the
correct version should be, whereas semantic
anomalies are typically not corrigible.
• Thus, *Me seed two mouses can easily be corrected to
I saw two mice, whereas there is no obvious way of
amending *The noiseless typewriter-blasts squirted
faithfully.
• However, while this may be generally true, it is not
difficult to find easily of correctable anomalies which
intuitively are clearly semantic: *The his hole is too
large for John to crawl through.
32. • There is a basic drawback with the notion of
corrigibility, which is that it is presupposed that one
knows what was originally intended.
• A better approach is to ask what is the minimum
change to the sentence that will remove the anomaly.
• Anomaly can be cured by replacing one (or more) of
the full lexical elements (i.e. a noun, verb, adjective, or
an adverb)
- John is *too small to get through this hole (big).
33. By changing one or more grammatical elements
(i.e. affixes, particles, determiners, etc), but not
by changing a full lexical item – *Mary be
going home (is).
Either by grammatical or by lexical adjustment
– *Mary went home tomorrow (Mary will go
home tomorrow) - grammatical adjustment
- Mary went home *tomorrow (Mary went
home yesterday/last week/etc) – lexical
adjustment
