AMBIGUITY

‘Mine is a long and sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice and sighing.

‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking with wonder at the Mouse’s tail, ‘but why do you call it sad?’

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland)

Knowing a word means knowing its sounds and the meaning. Both are necessary, for the same sounds can sometimes mean different things. Homonyms or homophones are different words that are pronounced the same. They may have the same or different spelling. To, too, and two are homophones because they are all pronounced /tu/; will as in last will and testament, Will the man’s name, and will to refer to the future mean different things but are spelt and pronounced identically.

       Homonyms may create ambiguity. A sentence is ambiguous if it can be understood or interpreted in more than one way. The sentence

            She cannot bear children

May be understood to mean ‘Shi is unable to give birth to children’, or ‘She cannot tolerate children’. The ambiguity is because there are two words bear with two different meanings. Sometimes additional context can help to disambiguate the sentence:

            She cannot bear children if they are noisy.

            She cannot bear children because she is infertile.

      Both words bear as used in the above sentences are verbs. There is another homonym bear, the animal, which is a noun with different semantic properties. The adjective bare despite its different spelling, is homophonous with the above words and also has a different meaning. Bare as a verb is yet another homonym.

      Homonyms are good candidates for humor as well as for confusion.

            ‘How is bread made?’

            ‘I know that!’ Alice cried eagerly.

            ‘You take some flour─’  

‘where do you pick the flower?’ the white Queen asked. ‘in the garden or in the hedges?’

‘Well, it isn’t picked at all’ Alice explained; it’s ground─’

‘How many acres of ground?’ said the White Queen.’

The humour of this passage is based on two sets of homonyms : flower and flour and the two meanings of ground.  Alice means ground as the past tense of grind, whereas the White Queen is interpreting ground to mean ‘earth’.

       Thus, sentences may be ambiguous because they contain one or more ambiguous words. This is known as lexical ambiguity.  The example below is also the example of ambiguity called structural ambiguity.

                        It takes two mice to screw in a light bulb.

The structural ambiguity is the ambiguity, in which the two or more meanings are not the result of lexical ambiguity but the result of two or more structures underlying the same string of words. In the sentence above, the word screw has two meaning, and the sentence has two structures, as shown below.

           

                                                VP

                                    V                     PP

                             To screw

                                                in             a light bulb

                                                VP

                                    V                     NP

                           to screw in             a light bulb

                                               

Such examples of homonyms and ambiguous sentences show that there is no one-to-one relation between sounds and meanings, and that we cannot always determine the precise meaning from the sound alone. They are further evidence that sound-meaning relationship in language is arbitrary, and that we must learn to relate sounds and meanings when learning a language.