Hello, Don L. F. Nilsen

Ambiguity is a phenomenon inherent in natural language and occurs when a linguistic expression may be understood in two or more different ways. Ambiguity can be classified into different types, such as lexical ambiguity (when a word has more than one meaning), syntactic ambiguity (when a sentence has more than one structure), semantic ambiguity (when a sentence has more than one interpretation), and pragmatic ambiguity (when a sentence depends on the context or the speaker's intention for its meaning).

Ambiguity is very prevalent in English and in other natural languages. It is estimated that about 7% of words in English are ambiguous, and that most sentences are potentially ambiguous. Ambiguity presents a challenging task for natural language processing, which is the field of computer science that deals with analyzing, understanding, and generating natural language. These systems have to deal with ambiguity at different levels of analysis, such as lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic.

However, ambiguity is not always a problem for human communication. In fact, some researchers argue that ambiguity is a necessary mechanism to ensure effective communication. Ambiguity allows speakers to be concise, flexible, creative, and polite. Ambiguity also allows listeners to infer the intended meaning from the context and the shared knowledge. Ambiguity can be used for various purposes, such as humor, irony, persuasion, or deception.

Lyudmil: Excellent response. I especially like your division of ambiguity into four types, and your point about the different levels at which ambiguity can occur: lexical, symntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic. It's also interesting that these are the same levels that can help disambiguate the ambiguity.

Scope of adjectives is a source of potential ambiguity in English and other languages:

Old men and women

Director of International Operations & Finance

Brian: Good point.

Choice of words and the word order are the major reasons for ambiguity.

For e.g.,

They called her a taxi.

So, either being a gentleman, helping a lady by fetching a taxi for her or being mischievous addressing her as 'a taxi' might be because of her taxi-coloured attire.

Thus, in the wrong syntactic word-order or word choices, each sentence is potentially ambiguous in all languages as syntax, grammar, semantics (sentence-level meaning) and Pragmatics (hidden meanings) plays a vital role in meaning creation.

Ambiguity can be considered as a smart language device in political discourses when people intentionally opt to be ambiguous to create multiple interpretations of their statements, so not to abide by their words in future or to hide important secretes.

At the same time, ambiguity can be dangerous as it is misleading. Several such historical / mythological references manifest the fact of ambiguity playing the role of a catalyst in changing the results.

Lack of context as well as non-verbal communication too leads to ambiguity.

Especially, a lot of misunderstanding happens over telephonic communication as the Non-verbal communication aspects like gestures, body language are not involved.

Thus, the intention, timing, word and structure choices influences ambiguity.

Vidya: Escellent comment not only on the properties of ambiguity, but also on the advantages and disadvantages of ambiguity. Very balanced answer.

Thanks a ton, Dr Don. Kindly count me in if you plan to work on any of these areas of Linguistics. I'd like to be a part of this intellectual work.

I believe we should add phonological ambiguity as well since suprasegmental units play vital role in creating ambiguity. The case is found in both English and Kurdish language.

Khoshi: You're absolutely right.

Dear Don, sorry for not participating in your interesting discussions for quite a long while. Very interesting notions from all the people above. In addition to the classification of Lyudmil and Khoshi, I would also suggest adding grammatical ambiguity and interlingual ambiguity. The former one may have two types: POS-related (e.g. a single English word may belong to different parts of speech) and grammatical-paradigm-related (e.g. when the forms of the same word are equal and the grammatical meaning may merely be retrieved from the context). Interlingual ambiguity concerns various overlaps of equally sounding or looking words in different languages. E.g. "No matter how kind you are, but German children are always kinder". The example refers to the graphemically equivalent forms of the English comparative form "kinder" (from "kind") and the Plural form of the German noun "Kind" (English: "child", Plural: "Kinder").

Another notion I would like to share supports Khoshi's notion about phonological ambiguity and the role of suprasegmentals in producing the effects of ambiguity. As far as I know, there are languages in which suprasegmentals are semantically relevant elements. However, suprasegmentals are relevant to produce pragmatic ambiguity in European languages, as well. E.g. the phrase "Good job!" may have opposite meanings depending on the discursive constellation it occurs in. Somebody can be praised by means of this phrase. In some other discursive contexts, the meaning of this phrase may be discerned as enantiosemic which results in sarcasm.

Elena: Thanks for your insights about grammatical and interlingual ambiguity, and also your insights about suprasegmentals. I'm reminded of a particula dialogue:

TEACHER: What is this?

CHILD: A frickin' elephant.

TEACHER: Why did you call it "a frickin' elephant?"

CHILD: It says on the bottom: "African elephant."

Dear Don, what a great joke! :-) I also was thinking about phonological words and their cross-linguistic similarities in pronunciation (it's also a reference to your PowerPoints about humor and arts, and artists' names).

Some more ideas about ambiguity: as soon as lexical units are embedded into a context the real meaning they convey may be discerned from the context. Moreover, we deal not merely with single lexical units but with collocations, real-life-situation (pragmatic level according to Crystal, 1997), formulaic structures (Kuiper, 2000 (https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/15ii/6_kuiper.pdf)), suprasegmentals, etc. All these variables intertwine and co-occur. This makes ambiguity a complex and dynamic phenomenon (cf. Bennett & Elman, 2006 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25791852) and other articles by Elman about dynamic systems, complexity, and causality). Puns and jokes may be the result of this dynamic process of speaking or writing. As far as I remember there was a book published on the complexity of humor (unfortunately I do not remember the exact title), but the dynamics of humor has not been researched yet...

Elena: Yes, you're right.