Functional Re-evaluation of Grammatical Forms in Context. Problem of meaning ambiguity in a language

 

Plan

1.  The meaning of ambiguity

2.  Lexical ambiguity

3.  Structural ambiguity

4.  Semantic ambiguity

5.  Re-evaluation of Verb. Aspect meaning

6.  Meaning of category of Voice

7.  Category of Tense

8. The most controversial category –Mood

9. Synonymy in Grammar

Conclusion

Literature

 

“Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

What does ambiguity do? How is poetic indeterminacy constitutive of propositional content? Do rhetorical and poetic tropes organize communicative acts in order to make them more understandable? Or do they rather dis-organize them in order to make them more understandable? What, then, is “understanding”? Does “the call of the phoneme” (Culler 1988) clarify and crystallize semantic reference? Distract us from the clarity of semantic reference? Simply distract us? The potential attraction and distraction of ambiguity is ever-present in discourse.

Language is an organizer of the world into meaningful units and gives form to experience. However, this organizing role of language is, by a number of accounts, the root cause of both the possibility of meaning and the inevitability of ambiguity. Because languages are inevitably smaller than the worlds of experience they describe, words have get more than one meaning.

The problem of potential polysemy in grammar is one of the most important, the one which is very complex and seems to be relevant to a number of aspects. Observations in this area have proved the efficiency of contextual, distributional and transformational methods of linguistic analysis. We distinguish here the interdependence of word-forms within the syntactic structure, the interdependence of elements within the word-forms and the influence of other levels of the same language.

1. The meaning of ambiguity

 

A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word 'light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like 'light', 'note', 'bear' and 'over' are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as 'light suit' and 'The duchess can't bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The phrase 'porcelain egg container' is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence 'The police shot the rioters with guns'. Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like 'I left her behind for you' and 'He saw her duck'.

The notion of ambiguity has philosophical applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity can aid in solving a philosophical problem. Suppose one wonders how two people can have the same idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes 'idea' in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a mental representation, from 'idea' in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept. On the other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions. Accordingly, the question arises of how genuine ambiguities can be distinguished from spurious ones. Part of the answer consists in identifying phenomena with which ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness and indexicality.

Although people are sometimes said to be ambiguous in how they use language, ambiguity is, strictly speaking, a property of linguistic expressions. A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. Obviously this definition does not say what meanings are or what it is for an expression to have one (or more than one). For a particular language, this information is provided by a grammar, which systematically pairs forms with meanings, ambiguous forms with more than one meaning

2. Lexical ambiguity

 

 Lexical ambiguity is more common. Everyday examples include nouns like 'chip', 'pen' and 'suit', verbs like 'call', 'draw' and 'run', and adjectives like 'deep', 'dry' and 'hard'. There are various tests for ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated antonyms, as with 'hard', which has both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites. Another is the conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence, 'The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court'. Evidence that the word 'suit' (not to mention 'press') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the 'crossed interpretation' of the sentence, on which 'suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and 'one' to a legal action.

The above examples of ambiguity are each a case of one word with more than one meaning. However, it is not always clear when we have only one word. The verb 'desert' and the noun 'dessert', which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinct words (they are homonyms). ............