Pragmatic Ambiguity

deal with these in turn.

3.3.1 Speech Acts

A speech act can be ambiguous between various types. ‘The cops are coming’ can be an assertion, a warning, or an expression of relief. ‘I’m sorry you were raised so badly’ can be an insult or an apology. ‘You want to cook dinner’ can, in Hebrew, function as a request or as a declarative sentence. ‘Can you pick me up later?’ can function as a request or a question or both. Many, if not all, sentences can be used in multiple ways.
Interestingly, these ambiguities are not always signaled by the content of the sentence. For example the following differ in their potential for use in speech acts though they seem to express similar content:
[list=18]
[*]Can you pass the salt?

[*]Are you able to pass the salt?

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Some creativity may allow (19) to function as a request but it is very difficult compared to (18).

3.3.2 Truth Conditional Pragmatic Ambiguity

‘Pragmatics’ has been used in two distinct ways in the philosophy of language. One relates to phenomena involving the valuation of pronouns etc. by context. The other is more generally about information one can convey by using a sentence that isn’t part of the literal meaning of the sentence. An interesting case that straddles the two is the notion, suggested by Donnellan (1966), that the apparent referential use of some sentences with definite descriptions might amount to a difference that shows up only in pragmatics. Donnellan writes:

اقتباس :: It does not seem possible to say categorically of a definite description in a particular sentence that it is a referring expression(of course, one could say this if he meant that it might be used to refer). In general, whether or not a definite description is used referentially or attributively is a function of the speaker’s intentions in a particular case. … Nor does it seem at all attractive to suppose an ambiguity in the meaning of the words; it does not appear to be semantically ambiguous. (Perhaps we could say that the sentence is pragmatically ambiguous ….) (Donnellan, p. 297)

Philosophers puzzled a great deal over the import of a ‘pragmatic’ ambiguity that wasn’t a speech act ambiguity or perhaps an ambiguity in what a speaker implies by uttering a sentence. It at least apparently is associated with truth conditional effects. Kripke (1977) and Searle (1979: p. 150 fn. 3) claim that pragmatic ambiguity is impossible. However, other advances in truth conditional pragmatics have opened the door to making some sense of what ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ might mean. While this is not the place for a careful look into truth conditional pragmatics (see Recanati 2010), it is worth noting that many truth conditional pragmatists would have little trouble thinking of the ambiguity as one that is located in interpretation by the hearer of a speech act whose content is univocal semantically.

3.3.3 Presuppositional Ambiguity

Ambiguity can be found at the level of presupposition as well. The case of ‘too’ is instructive. It has long been observed that the word ‘too’ carries presuppositions, as in:
[list=20]
[*]Maria solved the problem too.

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It’s natural on first read to think that (20) carries the presupposition that someone else solved the problem. But that need not be the case: it may presuppose that Maria solved the problem as well as having done some other thing, as in:
[list=21]
[*]Maria came up with the problem. Maria solved the problem too.

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Kent Bach (1982) explores the intriguing case of:
[list=22]
[*]I love you too.

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This can mean (at least) one of four distinct things:
[list=23]
[*]I love you (just like you love me)

[*]I love you (just like someone else does)

[*]I love you (and I love someone else)

[*]I love you (as well as bearing some other relationship (i.e. liking) to you)

[/list]
If none of these are true, ‘I love you too’ is clearly infelicitous. This suggests that ambiguities can arise at the presuppositional level just as they can at the syntactic or semantic level.

3.4 Other Interesting Cases

3.4.1 Pros Hen Ambiguity

Aristotle noticed in Metaphysics Γ2 that some words are related in meaning but subtly distinct in what they imply. He thought that ‘being’ was like this and he illustrates his point with examples such as ‘health’:

اقتباس :: There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be’, but all that ‘is’ is related to one central point, one definite kind of thing, and is not said to ‘be’ by a mere ambiguity. Everything which is healthy is related to health, one thing in the sense that it preserves health, another in the sense that it produces it, another in the sense that it is a symptom of health, another because it is capable of it. (Metaphysics Γ2)

The idea here is that there are words that differ in what they contribute to a phrase depending on what they are applied to. For example, the ‘primary’ sense of ‘healthy’ is that which applies to things that can enjoy health, such as people, dogs, plants, and perhaps corporations. However, we also apply ‘healthy’ to things that aren’t themselves healthy but are related to the health of a being that can be itself healthy. For example, your diet may be healthy not because it is failing to suffer from a disease but because it promotes your health. Your doctor may tell you that you have healthy urine on account of it being an indication of your health. This ambiguity is special in that the derivative senses of ‘health’ are all defined in terms of the more primary sense of ‘health’. Sometimes it is, no pun intended, ambiguous as in the case of ‘dogs are healthy pets’ which can both mean that dogs tend to be themselves healthy and that dogs tend to promote health in their owners.

3.4.2 Collective-Distributive Ambiguity

An interesting ambiguity is the collective-distributive ambiguity that occurs in the case of some predicates with certain quantificational or conjunctive antecedents. Consider:
[list=27]
[*]The politicians lifted the piano.

[*]Sam and Jess brokered deals.

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(27) and (28) both enjoy a collective reading on which the piano lifting is true of the politicians collectively but not true of any particular politician (similarly for the deal brokering and Sam and Jess). They also have distributive readings on which there were as many liftings of the piano as there were boys and at least two different deal brokerings respectively. On the latter, we can treat the conjunction in (28) as though it is a sentential conjunction; in the former we can’t. One might have been inclined to think of the ambiguity as an ambiguity in the quantifier in (27) and conjunction in (28). See section (4.1) for relevant considerations.

3.4.3 Ellipsis and Complement Ambiguity

An interesting case of ambiguity comes from ellipsis. The following is clearly ambiguous:
[list=29]
[*]John loves his mother and Bill does too.

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We’ve already discussed the bound/unbound ambiguity inherent in ‘John loves his mother’. Consider the bound reading of the first sentence. Now, on that reading, there are still two interpretations of the second sentence to deal with: one on which Bill loves John’s mother and one on which Bill loves his own. This ambiguity has been given the regrettable name ‘strict-sloppy identity’ and seems to be the result of what ‘does too’ is short form for. There is a long-standing debate over whether the mechanism is primarily one of copying over at LF (Fiengo and May 1994), the result of expressing a lambda-abstracted predicate (Sag, 1976; Williams, 1977) or the result of centering on a discourse referent (see Hardt and Stone 1997). As such, this ambiguity may well be better classified in the ‘syntactic’ category. What is interesting is that ambiguities can arise as much from words that aren’t written or said as ones that are.
Similar ambiguities come up in cases such as:
[list=30]
[*]Sam loves Jess more than Jason.

[/list]
(30) can mean either that Sam loves Jess more than he loves Jason or that Sam loves Jess more than Jason loves Jess. This ambiguity arises from phrasal and clausal comparatives: the phrasal comparative of ‘more than’ takes a noun phrase and relates Jess and Jason (effectively saying that the degree to which Sam loves Jess exceeds the degree to which he loves Jason). On the other hand, one can read (30) as involving ellipsis in which ‘loves Jess’ is stripped from the complement of Jason and left sotto voce.
3.4.4 Flexible Types
Montague (Montague 1973) held to a policy of holding fixed the semantic type of lexical items by their category, so that names, falling in the same category as quantifier phrases, were assigned the same type as quantifier phrases. Otherwise, he reasoned, there would be a type mismatch when we conjoined names and quantifier phrases. Others, however, have been content to posit ambiguities in type for one and the same expression. Thus, we may posit that ‘John’, when the word occurs alone, is of type ⟨e⟩ (entity referring) but when conjoined with ‘every man’, it is of type ⟨⟨e,t⟩,t⟩ (a function from functions to truth values) just like quantifier phrases. The semantics is carefully rigged so as not to make a truth-conditional difference; but there is ambiguity nonetheless in what names literally express.
There are alternatives. We could retain the univocality of names and treat ‘and’ as flexible in type depending on its arguments. We could also treat ‘and’ as a type-shifter. Similar considerations hold of verb phrases. Normal speakers should not be expected to have intuitions that would immediately decide the issue: presumably some very high-level theoretical questions (which theory is simpler, better, more integrated with the rest of linguistic theory) will be brought to bear on this issue.
3.4.5 Generic vs. Non-Generic Readings
Some terms are ambiguous between a generic and non-generic reading, and the sentences they play into are similarly ambiguous between the two readings. For example:
[list=31]
[*]Dinosaurs ate kelp. (Carlson 1982: p. 163)

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(31) is clearly ambiguous between a generic reading (equivalent roughly to ‘dinosaurs were kelp-eaters’) and a non-generic, episodic reading (equivalent to ‘there were some dinosaurs that ate some kelp’). The ambiguity can be located with certain predicates as well:
[list=32]
[*]John ate breakfast with a gold fork.

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The habitual reading (describing how John favored utensil for eating breakfast) vs. the episodic reading (describing a particular breakfast John ate) is evident in (32).
3.4.6 Inchoative Alternations
The following sentences are obviously related:
[list=33]
[*]I broke the vase.

[*]The vase broke.

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‘Broke’ and other words like it (e.g., ‘boiled’) have double lives as transitive and intransitive verbs. This could encourage one to posit an ambiguity (or a polysemy) since the putative lexical entries are closely related. However, that would be awfully quick: another approach is to take words like ‘broke’ as playing two distinct syntactic roles univocally, where the root ‘broke’ is a monadic predicate of events. Another is to take ‘broke’ to be univocal and allow the object to move into subject position. Whether or not the term is ambiguous lexically depends a great deal on which theory of the inchoative turns out to be right.
3.4.7 Granularity
An interesting and systematic (seeming) ambiguity corresponds roughly to the type-token distinction that philosophers cherish, though it is more general. Philosophers have noticed that (35) is ambiguous between a type and a token reading:
[list=35]
[*]I paid for the same car.

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(35) can express a complaint that a car was paid for twice or the claim that I now own a car that is like yours. How closely they have to correspond in similarity is an open question. But interestingly, the two senses cannot always be accessed felicitously:
[list=36]
[*]?I skidded on ice and hit the same car.

[/list]
One cannot read (36) as saying, say, that my Honda hit another Honda. It’s tempting to think that ‘same’ is the culprit, allowing for sameness across different levels of grain from the very fine to the very coarse. The phenomenon is quite wide-spread, however (See Hobbs 1985).

Pragmatic Ambiguity

3.3.1 Speech Acts

3.3.2 Truth Conditional Pragmatic Ambiguity

3.3.3 Presuppositional Ambiguity

3.4 Other Interesting Cases

3.4.1 Pros Hen Ambiguity

3.4.2 Collective-Distributive Ambiguity

3.4.3 Ellipsis and Complement Ambiguity

Pragmatic Ambiguity :: تعاليق

Pragmatic Ambiguity