Lexical and Semantic Ambiguity

One problem with attempting to identify different kinds of lexical and semantic ambiguity is that there is not a definitive consensus among commentators of how these terms should be defined. Semantic ambiguity has a fairly wide range of linguistic concern. Palmer discusses ambiguity as an attribute of the discipline of semantics in general. Semantic ambiguity, in Palmer's formulation, would refer to potentially multiple meanings of the "relations within language (sense) and relations between language and the world (reference)" (Palmer 914). In other words it would refer to a pattern or structure of meaning of a linguistic presentation, such as a sentence, a paragraph, a poem, a novel, a scene from a movie. The ambiguity is to be found in the sense relationships of the piece as a whole (or in parts of the whole).

It is difficult to discuss lexical and semantic ambiguity apart from pragmatics because so many commentaries bring in all three kinds in their discussions. For example, Poesio refers to semantic ambiguity as having simply a multiplicity of meanings (25), but he links it to the structure, or grammar, of a language in a way that assigns responsibility for the ambiguity to the deliberate intent of the one who originates but "underspecifies" what the language means or its rhetorical intent. Even where the rhetorical intent of the ambiguous expression is irrelevant, however, there may be a situation of perceived ambiguity, which has to do with the interpretation or "disam

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ion that has the potential effect of fusing lexical and semantic ambiguity. The same is true of Boguraev and Pustejovsky's volume titled Lexical Semantics. However, even if one insists on the presence of lexical ambiguity ("What city did I come from?" disambiguates the earlier statement), it would be subsumed by the structural dynamic that renders the statement ambiguous. The idea of subsuming lexical ambiguity in the semantic structure is discussed in the literature as context, which is associated with both semantic and lexical ambiguity. In the foregoing example, what would have the greatest potential to disambiguate the original statement would be the context in which it presented. Su sharpens the distinction when identifying lexical ambiguity simply as the possibility that "two or more distinct meanings or readings are tenable in a given context, rendering choice between the alternatives an uncertain one" (Su 55; emphasis added). What that suggests is that the semantic context contains the relevant lexeme. Indeed, the notion of context is an extremely important feature of discourse, identification, and disambiguation of lexical ambiguity. That point is made by Read in a comment on the interpenetration of lexical and semantic

Category: Misc - L