NMTS-Group1
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Ambiguity (Group 1)
Comments by the NMTS team
- Short description: Only mentions lexical and structural ambiguity…. maybe add other types of ambiguity or say why you only talk about these two types.
- glossary entry for "scope ambiguity"
Overview
Members
Short description of the topic
Ambiguity is an extremely widespread phenomenon on which many puns and jokes are based on.
It can be differentiated between lexical and structural ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity is defined as words having multiple meanings.
Example:
Is life worth living? It depends on the liver.
Structural ambiguity arises when the syntactic structure of a sentence allows more than one meaning.
Example:
rich women and men: [rich women] and men or rich [women or men]
Anna saw tourists with binoculars.: Anna saw [tourists with binoculars] or Anna saw [tourists] with binoculars.
Besides these general terms, within the presentation and exercises more distinct terms are introduced: collective-distributive and scope.
Collective-distributive ambiguity is defined on the level of morphemes. The ambigious parts of speech are the plural morphemes.
Example:
Mary and her sister had a little lamb: Mary and her sister own one little lamb together or each of them has an own little lamb.
A double meaning is created on the lexical or structural level of meaning by:
References and links
References
- Bieswanger, Markus & Annette Becker. 2006. Introduction to English Linguistics (3rd edition). Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag.
- Kortmann, Bernd. 2005. English Linguistics: Essentials. Berlin: Cornelsen Verlag.
- Fromkin, Victoria; Rodman, Robert & Hyams, Nina. 2003. An Introduction to Language (7th edition). Boston: Thomson Heinle.
- Matthias Bauer, Joachim Knape, Peter Koch, Susanne Winkler. 2010. Dimensionen der Ambiguität. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 158, 7-75.
Links
Our e-learning objects
Our wikipages
- Ambiguity (definition in Basic Glossary)
- antonym (definition in Basic Glossary)
- entailment (definition in Basic Glossary)
- homograph (definition in Basic Glossary)
- Lexical Ambiguity (definition in Basic Glossary)
- Polysemy (definition in Basic Glossary)
- register (definition in Basic Glossary)
- structural ambiguity (definition in Basic Glossary)
Our podcasts
Our materials for an interactive whiteboard
Our pictures
Anna's cat Carlo
Marc M
Nicki
Jellyfishes (Zoo Berlin), Lorena's picture
Leo
Poor women and men, Reading 1 & 2
Peter read the book on the Eiffel Tower, Reading 1
Peter read the book on the Eiffel Tower, Reading 2
Our exercises
Exercise I
General definition of ambiguity
a) What is an ambiguous word?
1. a word with only one meaning
2. a polysemous word
3. a homophone word
b) What is the technical term for words that have more than one meaning?
1. scope ambiguity
2. lexical ambiguity
3. structural ambiguity
c) Which word is the ambiguous word in the sentence?
1. I bought it without any further inquiry.
2. There is no bank in this town.
d) Think of three sentences in which the word “hot” has different meanings.
Check your solution!
Exercise II
Different types of ambiguity
a) Phrases and sentences as a whole can have more than one meaning. How is this form of ambiguity called?
1. Scope Ambiguity
2. Lexical Ambiguity
3. Structural Ambiguity
b) Which two meanings does the following sentence contain? Paraphrase them.
We need more intelligent administrators.
→ Paraphrases
c) Think of an ambiguous phrase or sentence on your own and explain its ambiguity.
→ Example
Exercise III
Trees
a) Draw the two different trees of the following phrase.
poor women and men
→ Trees
b) Draw the two different trees of the following sentence.
Peter read the book on the Eiffel-Tower.
→ Trees