PAPER OF SEMANTICS
“ AMBIGUITY 
”
”
INSTITUTE
OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION MATARAM
FACULTY
OF EDUCATION OF LANGUAGE AND ART
ENGLISH
FOR EDUCATION
2015
PREFACE
First at all, give thanks to Allah swt and prophet
Muhammad saw loves and grace for us. Thanks to God who has helped us chance to
finish this assignment timely, and we would like to say thank you to Mr.Taufik Sudiyatno,
M.Pd as the lecturer that always teaches us and give much knowledge especially
in Semantics.
This assignment is the one of Semantics task with the tittle “Ambiguity”. We realized this assignment
is far from perfect, but we hope it can be useful for us. Critics and
suggestion is needed here to make this assignment be better.
Mataram, 5th May 2015
Writers
AMBIGUITY
A. Definition
of Ambiguity
Ambiguity is
an attribute of any concept, idea, statement or claim whose meaning, intention
or interpretation cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or
process consisting of a finite number of steps. The
concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness.
In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although
some may not be immediately apparent), whereas with information that is vague,
it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity.
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. Words like
'light', 'note', 'bear' and 'over' are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases
or sentences in which they occur, such as 'light suit' and 'The duchess can't
bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of
their constituents is. The phrase 'porcelain egg container' is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence 'The
police shot the rioters with guns'. Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a
structural basis, as with sentences like 'I left her behind for you' and 'He
saw her duck'.
The notion of
ambiguity has philosophical applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity
can aid in solving a philosophical problem. Suppose one wonders how two people
can have the same idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one
distinguishes 'idea' in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a
mental representation, from 'idea' in the sense of an abstract, shareable
concept. On the other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly
simple solutions. Accordingly, the question arises of how genuine ambiguities
can be distinguished from spurious ones. Part of the answer consists in
identifying phenomena with which ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness,
unclarity, inexplicitness and indexicality
B.
Types of Ambiguity
Although people are sometimes said to
be ambiguous in how they used language, ambiguity is, strictly speaking, a property of linguistic
expressions. A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one
meaning. Obviously this definition does not say what meanings are or what it is
for an expression to have one (or more than one). For a particular language,
this information is provided by a grammar, which systematically pairs forms
with meanings, ambiguous forms with more than one meaning (see MEANING and SEMANTICS).
There are many types of ambiguity such as lexical, structural and phonetics ambiguity. 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'.
There are various tests for ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated
antonyms, as with 'hard', which has both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites.
Another is the conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence, 'The tailor
pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court'. Evidence that the
word 'suit' (not to mention 'press') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of
the 'crossed interpretation' of the sentence, on which 'suit' is used to refer
to an article of clothing and 'one' to a legal action.
The above examples of ambiguity are
each a case of one word with more than one meaning. However, it is not always
clear when we have only one word. The verb 'desert' and the noun 'dessert',
which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinct words (they
are homonyms). So do the noun 'bear' and the verb 'bear', even though they not
only sound the same but are spelled the same. These examples may be clear cases
of homonymy, but what about the noun 'respect' and the verb 'respect' or the
preposition 'over' and the adjective 'over'? Are the members of these pairs
homonyms or different forms of the same word? There is no general consensus on
how to draw the line between cases of one ambiguous word and cases of two
homonyous words. Perhaps the difference is ultimately arbitrary.
Sometimes one meaning of a word is
derived from another. For example, the cognitive sense of 'see' seems derived
from its visual sense. The sense of 'weigh' in 'He weighed the package' is
derived from its sense in 'The package weighed two pounds'. Similarly, the
transitive senses of 'burn', 'fly' and 'walk' are derived from their
intransitive senses. Now it could be argued that in each of these cases the
derived sense does not really qualify as a second meaning of the word but is
actually the result of a lexical operation on the underived sense. This
argument is plausible to the extent that the phenomenon is systematic and
general, rather than peculiar to particular words. Lexical semantics has the
task of identifying and characterizing such systematic phemena. It is also
concerned to explain the rich and subtle semantic behavior of common and highly
flexible words like the verbs 'do' and 'put' and the prepositions 'at', 'in'
and 'to'. Each of these words has uses which are so numerous yet so closely
related that they are often described as 'polysemous' rather than ambiguous.
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 hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting
relatives can be boring'. 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 (see SYNTAX).
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.
It is arguable that the operative reading depends on whether or not the
implicit subject of the infinitive clause 'to eat' is tied anaphorically to the
subject ('the chicken') of the main clause.
It is not always clear when we have a
case of structural ambiguity. Consider, for example, the elliptical sentence,
'Perot knows a richer man than Trump'. It has two meanings, that Perot knows a
man who is richer than Trump and that Perot knows man who is richer than any
man Trump knows, and is therefore ambiguous. But what about the sentence 'John
loves his mother and so does Bill'? It can be used to say either that John
loves John's mother and Bill loves Bill's mother or that John loves John's
mother and Bill loves John's mother. But is it really ambiguous? One might
argue that the clause 'so does Bill' is unambiguous and may be read
unequivocally as saying in the context that Bill does the same thing that John
does, and although there are two different possibilities for what counts as
doing the same thing, these alternatives are not fixed semantically. Hence the
ambiguity is merely apparent and better described as semantic
underdetermination.
Although ambiguity is fundamentally a
property of linguistic expressions, people are also said to be ambiguous on
occasion in how they use language. This can occur if, even when their words are
unambiguous, their words do not make what they mean uniquely determinable.
Strictly speaking, however, ambiguity is a semantic phenomenon, involving
linguistic meaning rather than speaker meaning (see MEANING AND COMMUNICATION);'pragmatic
ambiguity' is an oxymoron. Generally when one uses ambiguous words or
sentences, one does not consciously entertain their unintended meanings,
although there is psycholinguistic evidence that when one hears ambiguous words
one momentarily accesses and then rules out their irrelevant senses. When
people use ambiguous language, generally its ambiguity is not intended. Occasionally,
however, ambiguity is deliberate, as with an utterance of 'I'd like to see more
of you' when intended to be taken in more than one way in the very same context
of utterance.
There are
three types of ambiguity :
a.
Lexical Ambiguity
Lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single
word. Lexical ambiguity contrasted
with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number
of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter
represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of
which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. This form of ambiguity is
closely related to vagueness. At the level of lexical ambiguity another word can have
meaning more than one. As a result, people often times mistakenly interpret the
meaning of a word. Thus, the meaning of a word can be different depending on
the context of the sentence itself. As the saying used to dig in field crops
will be different meaning when used in the field of law or justice. The example
in the sentence :
“Farmers digging the ground behind his house”.
Will has different meaning with the sentence “The Police are trying to dig up information
of witnesses”.
b.
Structural Ambiguity
Structural ambiguity is arises when the process of
forming units both at the level of language morphology, words, phrases,
sentences or paragraph and discourse. The ambiguity of the word caused because
morphology will disappear with itself when put in the context correct sentence.
Here is an example structural ambiguity :
1.
Ambiguity caused by events grammatically word
formation. For example, “sleep” after receiving the suffix “er”: turned into a
“sleeper”, this word can mean a person who likes to sleep and can also mean a
drug that causes people asleep.
2.
The ambiguity of the phrase. For example, “parents”
in Indonesia can be meaningful our
parents are mothers and fathers, or the old person. To avoid this ambiguity, we
must add explanatory elements such as “my parents” or parents to phrase that
refers to the father and mother. As for the second meaning can added the word
“who” then becomes the old.
c.
Phonetic Ambiguity
Ambiguity in the phonetic (sound) on this level
occur because sounds mingle language pronounced. Sometimes we could be wrong
interpreting the meaning of a word or phrase because when the conversation
phrase or word to soon to say.
For example : the sentence “The mother stand up in front
of my sister”. This sentence if the pronunciation is not interpreted by a stand
in front of the mother’s sister (aunt)
or it could be interpreted that stand in front of the sister is mother.
C.
SEMANTIC AMBIGUITY
Semantic
ambiguity happens when a sentence contains an ambiguous word
or phrase, a
word or phrase that has more than one meaning. In "We saw her duck"
(example due to Richard Nordquist), the word "duck" can refer either
- to the person's bird (the noun "duck", modified by the possessive pronoun "her"), or
- to a motion she made (the verb "duck", the subject of which is the objective pronoun "her", object of the verb "saw").
For
example, "You could do with a new automobile. How about a test
drive?" The clause "You could do with" presents a statement with
such wide possible interpretation as to be essentially meaningless.[citation needed] Lexical
ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice
between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent
interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible
interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. This
form of ambiguity is closely related to vagueness.
D.
SYNTATIC AMBIGUITY
Syntactic
ambiguity arises when a sentence can have two (or more)
different meanings because of the structure of the sentence, it’s
syntax. This is often due to a modifying expression, such as a prepositional
phrase, the application of which is unclear. "He ate the cookies on the
couch", for example, could mean that he ate those cookies that were on the
couch (as opposed to those that were on the table), or it could mean that he
was sitting on the couch when he ate the cookies. "To get in, you will
need an entrance fee of $10 or your voucher and your drivers' license."
This could mean that you need EITHER ten dollars OR BOTH your voucher and your
license. Or it could mean that you need EITHER ten dollars OR a voucher AND you
also need your license. Only rewriting the sentence, or placing appropriate
punctuation can resolve a syntactic ambiguity.[2] For
the notion of, and theoretic results about, syntactic ambiguity in
artificial, formal
languages (such as computer programming
languages), see Ambiguous grammar.
Spoken
language can contain many more types of ambiguities, where
there is more than one way to compose a set of sounds into words, for example
"ice cream" and "I scream". Such ambiguity is generally
resolved according to the context. A mishearing of such, based on incorrectly
resolved ambiguity, is called a mondegreen.
E.
LITERATURE
AND RETHORIC
In Literature and Rethoric, ambiguity can be a useful
tool. Groucho Marx's
classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for example: "Last night I shot an
elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know". Songs
and poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the song
title "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" (where "blue" can
refer to the color, or to sadness).
F.
Function
of Ambiguity
Ambiguity in literature serves the purpose
of lending a deeper meaning to a literary work. By introducing ambiguity in
their works, writers give liberty to the readers to use their imagination to
explore meaning. This active participation of the readers involves them in the
prose or poetry they read.
CONCLUSION
I.
Ambiguity
is an attribute of any concept, idea,
statement or claim whose meaning, intention or interpretation cannot be
definitively resolved according to a rule or process consisting of a finite
number of steps or on the other hand, ambuity is a word, phrase, or sentence is
ambiguous if it has more than one meaning.
II. There are three types
of ambiguity :
a.
Lexical
Ambiguity
is the
presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word.
b.
Structural
Ambiguity
is arises when
the process of foming units both at the level of language morphology, words,
phrases, sentences or pharagraph and discourse.
c.
Phonetic Ambiguity
is on this level
occur because sounds mingle language pronounced. Sometimes we could be wrong
interpreting the meaning of a word or phrase because when the conversation
phrase or word to soon to say.
III. Semantics Ambiguity
Semantic ambiguity happens when a sentence contains
an ambiguous word or phrase, a word or phrase that has more than one meaning.
IV. Syntactic
Ambiguity
Syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can have
two (or more) different meanings because of the structure of the sentence, it’s syntax. This is often due to a
modifying expression, such as a prepositional phrase, the application of which
is unclear.
V. Literature
and rethoric
In Literature and Rethoric, ambiguity can be a useful
tool. Groucho Marx's
classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for it’s humor, for example: "Last night I shot an elephant
in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know". Songs and
poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the song title
"Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" (where "blue" can refer
to the color, or to sadness).
VI. Function of Ambiguity
Ambiguity in
literature serves the purpose of lending a deeper meaning to a literary work.
By introducing ambiguity in their works, writers give liberty to the readers to
use their imagination to explore meaning. This active participation of the
readers involves them in the prose or poetry they read.
REFERENCES
www.semantics.search.org.com
Atlas, J. D. (1989) Philosophy
without Ambiguity: A Logico-Linguistic Essay, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(Examines ambiguity tests and questions certain philosophical appeals to
ambiguity.)
Cruse, D. A. (1986) Lexical
Semantics, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49-68.
(Discusses linguistic features of ambiguity and examines tests for it.)
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