NMTS-Group1
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Ambiguity (Group 1)
Overview
Members
Short description of the topic
Ambiguity is an extremely widespread phenomenon on which many puns and jokes are based on.
A double meaning, i.e. ambiguity, is created on the lexical or structural level of meaning by:
Either words, phrases or whole sentences can be ambigous.
It can be differentiated between lexical and structural ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity is defined as words having multiple meanings. This form of ambiguity is fairly widespread and many puns and jokes are based on it.
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.
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.
Links
- "ambiguity" in Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Lexicon of Linguistics: http://www2.let.uu.nl/Uil-OTS/Lexicon/
Our e-learning objects
Our wikipages
Our podcasts
List all the podcasts that were created by your group.
Our materials for an interactive whiteboard
List all the files that your group created for the interactive whiteboard.
Our pictures
Anna's cat Carlo
Marc M
Nicki
Jellyfishes (Zoo Berlin), Lorena's picture
Leo
Our exercises
Provide links to all the exercises that your group has created.
- Exercise on types of ambiguities. Link to the exercise (only one example so far).