Page 409 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

SECTION VIII
Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
Ambiguity K. Wales
The concept of'ambiguity,' much discussed in seman- tics, is of crucial concern in the study of literary language. This article first looks at the linguistic defi- nition of ambiguity, and then considers some of its pragmatic and stylistic implications.
1. Linguistic Ambiguity
Ambiguity describes the linguistic phenomenon whereby expressions are potentially understood in two or more ways; an ambiguous expression has more than one interpretation in its context.
Multiple meaning seems to be universal in human language, because of the arbitrary relationship between sign and referent. The two main kinds of multiple meaning are 'polysemy' (when an expression has developed more than one meaning, e.g., 'plot'; 'branch'); and 'homonymy' (when an expression has the same form as another, but a different etymology and meaning: e.g., 'port'; 'flock'). The lexicon of English is particularly rich in multiple meaning because of its varied history: the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for instance, rec- ords 154 sense divisions under the word set. What is remarkable is that such a 'heavy' semantic load, which applies similarly for a large number of common core lexical items, can be tolerated in everyday usage with- out ambiguity inevitably occurring. Yet the main causes of lexical ambiguity are indeed polysemy and homonymy. The answer lies in the notion of context: for an expression to be ambiguous, the two or more acts of interpretation must take place simultaneously, and in the same context. Speakers of English are not normally likely to confuse or bring together the different senses of plot ('action of story' and 'piece of land'). But when this happens, ambiguity can be the result.
It is important to stress the 'can be.' Even granted that it is explained as a semantic phenomenon, from a pragmatic point of view ambiguity does not necess- arily arise even when linguistic conditions seem ideal for it. For communication does not take place in a vacuum: one's interpretation of a sentence in a written
text will take into account the whole co-text; the interpretation of a spoken utterance will take into account the natural redundancy of language, and also the whole situational context surrounding speech. But certainly the absence of such a context probably explains why ambiguity is commoner in writing, especially in registers where the co-text itself is unelab- orated: e.g., notices, headlines, and slogans ('Dogs must be carried on escalators'; 'Free women'). It is in writing that 'grammatical ambiguity' is particularly noticeable, where more than one structural interpret- ation is possible: 'Free women' as an imperative, or a noun phrase, for instance. Grammatical ambiguity was one of the main arguments used for establishing 'deep' and 'surface' structures in transformational grammar of the 1960s. In speech, stress and intonation help usefully to distinguish syntactic structures, clues which are absent in writing, so giving rise to further causes of ambiguity: 'Flying planes can be dangerous,' for example. There is also the obvious point, but which has important implications for the written medium, that if a spoken utterance is ambiguous, the addressee can ask the speaker directly for clarification.
2. Ambiguity and Ambivalence
In ordinary parlance ambiguity often has pejorative overtones, regarded as a stylistic fault, like vagueness and obscurity. For as Grice (1975) has stressed, it is a fundamental principle of 'normal' communication that people work cooperatively together to achieve coherent and effective exchanges. And by what Grice calls the 'maxim of manner' one normally tries to be clear, and so avoid obscurity and ambiguity, etc. Hence readers might be irritated by an ambiguous newspaper headline like 'British teachers amongst poorest in Europe.'
The 'cooperative principle' puts the burden of responsibility for effective communication on the speaker or writer. The implication is that ambiguity could be avoided and that it is due to carelessness. But there is another kind of ambiguity that is in contrast intentional. In Orwellian terms, this has been dubbed
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