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.
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 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 Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland TABLE OF CONTENT I INTRODUCTION II DEVELOPMENT WHAT IS AMBIGUITY? WHEN DOES IT ARISE? 1.1 Ambiguity - Ambiguity vs Vagueness 1.2 Cases of Ambiguity LEXICAL AMBIGUITY 2.1 Homonymy 2.2 Polysemy GRAMMATICAL AMBIGUITY EXAMPLE OF AMBIGUITY IN THE NOVEL "ALICE'S ADVENTURE IN WONDERLAND" 10 III CONCLUSION 13 IV REFERENCES 14 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland II DEVELOPMENT 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? Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 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 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 it next week Americans make more telephone calls than Canadians The government has provided constant finding for post-secondary education over last three years 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 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 not directly depend on syntactic structure of a sentence Such ambiguity usually involves negation (not), quantification (every, some) and other elements like tense, which 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 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland 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 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" 10 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland "At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon `Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favored by the pope, was soon submitted "to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria "' Then comes the history of the mouse The homonymy "tail" vs "tale" makes little Alice "puzzling" here: `Mine is a long and a sad tale!' said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing `It IS a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; `but why you call it sad?' And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this…" The conversation with the Caterpillar may be one of the most interesting parts: `Explain yourself!' `I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.' `I don't see,' said the Caterpillar Or: The Caterpillar was the first to speak `What size you want to be?' it asked `Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; `only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.' `I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar Another example is that: And how many hours a day did you lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle, “nine the next, and so on.” 11 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland “What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice “That's the reason they're called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.” The author seems to be very well playing with language, which is the main attraction the novel Generations of children and adults also are fascinated by the strange, exciting adventure and an innocent Alice, who is very much like one of us To reach such marvelous success, Lewis Carroll has showed off her talent in words and sentences in such a beautiful way 12 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland III CONCLUSION Semantic Ambiguity is one of the most interesting topic in human language and conversation Because of the limited time and capacity, all the interesting example cannot be fully listed and carefully analyzed Hopefully in the future, I would have some chance to come back with this topic as well as my ever favorite story "Alice's adventure in wonderland" 13 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland IV REFERENCES Cann, R (1960) Formal semantics: an introduction Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hughes, W & Lavery, J (2004) Critical thinking: an introduction to the basic skills Toronto: Broadview Press Ltd Hurum, S (1988) Handling scope ambiguity in English Department of Computing Science University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Lyons, J (1996) Linguistic semantics: an introduction Cambridge: Cambridge university press Matthews, P (2000) Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics Oxford: Oxford University Press Nguyen, H (2004) Understanding English Semantics Hanoi: Vietnam National University Hanoi Press Quine, W (1960) Word and Object The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Suzuki, M (2007) The Best Imperative Approach to Deontic Discourse From the world wide web: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1186164664 14 Le Thi Nhung - K18c ... Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland I INTRODUCTION Ability to have linguistic communication is one of the outstanding features of human beings in such a colorful... favorite story "Alice's adventure in wonderland" 13 Le Thi Nhung - K18c Ambiguity and Examples form "Alice's adventure in wonderland IV REFERENCES Cann, R (1960) Formal semantics: an introduction Cambridge:... at least one of them 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