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تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
 | | Contextual Resolution and Degree of Zeugma | |
As we suggested above, context-sensitivity, vagueness and indexicality are frequently thought to be different phenomena than ambiguity, requiring a different treatment than lexical proliferation or differences in structure. However, in context, it can be pretty easy to make them pass some of the tests for ambiguity. For example, consider James who wants to meet a man who is overweight for a male model and Jane who wants to meet a man who is overweight for a plus sized model. The following strikes me as at least mildly zeugmatic:[list=58] [*]?James wants to marry an overweight man and Jane does too. [/list] (58) isn’t as bad as the ‘bank’ examples above, but it’s noticeably misleading. Or, consider, James speaking to Jill and disagreeing over the relevant height required to be tall:[list=59] [*]That man i is tall but he i’s not tall. [/list] It’s possible, I think, to get a non-contradictory reading of (59). This is especially easy if you put some focal stress on the second ‘overweight’. Of course, putting focal stress on a word is cheating and certainly not semantically innocent. But this just shows how many variables one has to control for to run the tests.Similarly, speaker’s reference and semantic reference distinctions mentioned above can interfere with the proper operation of the tests. Let’s consider a variant on Kripke’s famous case. We see someone who looks like Smith (but is Jones) raking the leaves and someone else sees Smith (the actual Smith) raking leaves. Can we hear the following as non-zeugmatic?[list=60] [*]We saw Smith raking the leaves and he did too. [/list] In context, this sounds awfully bad to me. It doesn’t seem, however, that ‘Smith’ is ambiguous in sometimes referring to Jones, sometimes Smith.The bottom line is that in clear cases, the tests work great. In controversial cases, one must be very careful and run many of them and hope for the best; it will sometimes involve sifting through degrees of zeugma. 4.8 Metaphor and Non-Literal UsageMetaphor and non-literal usage can also confound the tests. For example, the following are zeugmatic:[list=61] [*]?We thought we saw Smith in the dumps and he did too. [*]?Life and the 401 are highways. [/list] The metaphors aren’t very good and (61) and (62) are clearly zeugmatic. Given how many parts of speech can be used metaphorically, slavish obedience to the test would postulate massive and unconstrained ambiguity in natural language. (See Camp 2006) The natural answer is to restrict the use of the test to cases in which the words are used literally; but of course the tests are supposed to help us decide when we have literal, semantic difference and when we don’t. To add to the complication, metaphors that are used in similar manners over time tend to become ‘dead’ metaphors—literally ambiguities that took a causal path through metaphor. Since the passing of the non-literal into the standardized literal is hopelessly vague, it will be difficult in some pressing cases to tell what has been lexicalized as a different meaning and what has not.5. Philosophical IssuesThere are a few main philosophical issues involved in ambiguity. 5.1 ValidityMany arguments look persuasive but fail on closer inspection on account of structural and/or lexical ambiguity. For example, consider:[list=63] [*]Babe Ruth owned a bat. [*]Bats have wings. [*]Babe Ruth owned something with wings. [/list] The argument looks valid and the premises seem true, on at least one reading, but the conclusion doesn’t follow.If logic is to be free of issues that would complicate telling valid from non-valid arguments by form, detecting ambiguity is essential to logical representation of natural language arguments. Frege noted this to be the main defect of natural language and a real obstacle to trying to formalize it (as opposed to just using the formal language without translation from natural language). We typically are more optimistic on this point than Frege; but the long history of dispute over such issues as the pragmatic-semantics distinction and skepticism over the viability of semantic theory in general stand as challenges. 5.2 Basic Semantic MethodologyAmbiguity has been used methodologically as a way to shield a theory from counter-example. Kripke laments this tendency explicitly: - اقتباس :
- It is very much the lazy man’s approach in philosophy to posit ambiguities when in trouble. If we face a putative counterexample to our favorite philosophical thesis, it is always open to us to protest that some key term is being used in a special sense, different from its use in the thesis. We may be right, but the ease of the move should counsel a policy of caution: Do not posit an ambiguity unless you are really forced to, unless there are really compelling theoretical or intuitive grounds to suppose that an ambiguity really is present.(Kripke 1977, p.268)
Grice (1975) counsels a methodological principle: ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’.This general moral seems right. It is worryingly easy to deflect a counter-example or to explain an intuition by claiming differences in meaning. On the other hand, in philosophical discourse, distinctions that are quite fine can be made that may well be missed by normal users of the language who are inclined to overlook or to be blind to differences in meaning that are slight. One thus often will be tempted to posit ambiguity as a way to reconcile differences between two plausible hypotheses about the meanings of words and phrases (‘evidence’ has both an internal sense and an external sense, ‘right action’ has both a utilitarian sense and a deontic sense…) A neat case of this is Gilbert Ryle’s contention that ‘exists’ is ambiguous mentioned above: - اقتباس :
- …two different senses of ‘exist’, somewhat as ‘rising’ has different senses in ‘the tide is rising’, ‘hopes are rising’, and ‘the average age of death is rising’. A man would be thought to be making a poor joke who said that three things are now rising, namely the tide, hopes and the average age of death. It would be just as good or bad a joke to say that there exist prime numbers and Wednesdays and public opinions and navies; or that there exist both minds and bodies. (Ryle 1949, p. 23)
Ryle here makes use of the conjunction reduction test mentioned above and has been the target of much scorn for his intuitions on this matter. This may just go to show how hard it is to (dis)prove a claim to ambiguity using the tests. 5.3 The Analytic-Synthetic DistinctionOne long-standing issue about ambiguity is that it assumes a difference between something like sense and reference. While some words can clearly be used to refer to things that are wildly different in ontic category, that has not been taken to be sufficient for a claim to ambiguity. In theory, a phrase could be ambiguous and yet differ not at all in reference: imagine a term t that was ambiguous between two meanings, but it turned out as highly surprising essential condition that things that were t in the first sense were also t in the second sense—while this seems unlikely to happen, it is by no means conceptually impossible.However, the 20th century saw a vicious and sometimes relentless attack on the distinction between facts about meaning and facts about reference. If the line between these two is blurry, there will very likely be cases in which the line between ambiguity and sense-generality is blurry as well (and not just epistemologically). Let’s indulge in some possible-world anthropology on a group that uses a term, ‘gavagai’. Furthermore, I stipulate (perhaps counter-possibly) that the world is a four-dimensional world with respect to the referent of ‘gavagai’ so if they refer at all with ‘gavagai’, they refer to something made up of stages. Now we sit down to write the lexicon of the world’s inhabitants and we come to ‘gavagai’. We write: - اقتباس :
- ‘Gavagai’ (ga-vuh-guy): (N, sing.):
It’s not easy to know what to write down for this entry as it’s not obvious what counts as semantic content for the word and what counts as information about the referent of the word. For example, say they clearly think that the referent of ‘gavagia’ is something that does not have temporal parts. Does this mean that they fail to refer to rabbits with ‘gavagai’ or that they are mistaken about their nature? If this question is hard to answer, we can generalize to harder cases: say that some of the ‘rabbits’ in this world are three-dimensional and some four- dimensional. Should we countenance an ambiguity in ‘gavagai’ given that the people use it indiscriminately to refer to both? Should we posit a lexical ambiguity with two different definitions for ‘gavagai’?This case may be far-fetched; but we have a real live cases of it. Field (1973) does a nice job of showing how this is the case with respect to the term ‘mass’, which seems to have been thought to pick out one property of objects but in fact picks out two that are really very different in character. Deciding whether this is a surprising case of disjunctive reference, or an indeterminacy in reference is no easy task, but the decision has ramifications for whether or not we categorize ‘mass’ as ambiguous or highly sense-general (and if sense-general, what is the general sense?) 5.4 The Flexibility of the LexiconOne last interesting fact. The lexicon is highly productive and easily extended. Most people, including myself, upon hearing:[list=66] [*]She bought a rabbit. [/list] We will think that it’s safe to infer that she probably bought a fuzzy little pet that hops around and likes carrots. However, upon learning that there is a car by the same name made by Volkswagen, it will be much less clear to me that I know what she bought.Similar phenomena include dead metaphors and idioms. The former include such items as ‘branch’ which now applies to distinct sections of the government, the latter to phrases ‘kick the bucket.’ (As an aside, I puzzled over several candidates for both and realized it was hard to tell in most cases which were which!) These clearly pass the ambiguity tests above by exhibiting zeugma, i.e.,[list=67] [*]?The government and the trees have branches. [*]?He kicked the bucket last week and she did too, twice. [/list] It’s controversial whether metaphors ever actually die and whether or not, assuming they do die, they are metaphors. So it is controversial whether or not ‘branch’ is lexically ambiguous. It clearly has two readings but whether or not these are to be reflected as lexical meanings is a difficult and vague matter—not that it clearly matters all that much in most cases. 5.5 Legal InterpretationsOn the other hand, the facts about ambiguity can matter a great deal when it comes to determining policy, extension of law etc. The law is sensitive to this and makes certain division between ambiguities. For example, the law divides between patent and latent ambiguity, where the former roughly corresponds to a case where the meaning of a law is unclear, the latter to cases where the meaning is clear but applies equally well to highly disparate things. In effect, this is the difference between ambiguity in sense and ambiguity in reference (seen most clearly in pronominal cases).Often U.S. Constitution scholars will claim that the Constitution is ‘ambiguous’. A famous example of such an ambiguity is the succession of the vice president, where the framers stipulate that: - اقتباس :
- In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, (Article 2, section 1)
The clause is not clear as to what ‘devolve’ means, and scholars are at a loss to capture the framers’ intent.Of course, given what has been discussed, this looks to be more like a case of under-specificity, or simply ignorance of a word’s meaning (in 1787), not ambiguity. As the distinction has no real legal relevance in this case, it is ignored as it generally is in common parlance.6. Ambiguity and Indexicality: Are They Easily Told Apart?In section 2 we looked at phenomena that were not the same as ambiguity; in this section, we look at a few cases in which we might have been wrong to tear them apart. 6.1 Deictic vs. Bound AnaphoraIt is often claimed that:[list=69] [*]John loves his mother. [/list] is ambiguous between a deictic reading and a bound reading. Syntactic orthodoxy holds that either ‘his’ is co-indexed with John or it bears a different referential index. Various theories of anaphora, however, have claimed that we can dispense with the fundamental ambiguity between free and bound anaphora and unify the treatment of the two. Dynamic Semantics aspires to offer just such a unified account, taking all anaphora to always refer to discourse referents, or functions from information states to information states. This provides a unified treatment of the function of anaphora in natural language and dispenses with the need to think of anaphoric interpretation as ambiguous as opposed to merely context-sensitive. (See Heim 1982, 1983, and Kamp 1981). 6.2 The Scope of IndefinitesConsider:[list=70] [*]Every man who read a book by Chomsky is happy. [/list] (70) is ambiguous between one where ‘a book by Chomsky’ takes wide scope over ‘every man who reads’ and one where it takes narrow scope. Maybe so; but most quantifiers in fact cannot escape from relative clauses. Relative clauses are known as ‘scope islands’, or contexts in which quantifiers can’t be interpreted as raised. In fact, it has been noted that indefinites seem to escape from nearly any normal scope island whatsoever. This suggests that treating the various readings as an ambiguity akin to other scopal ambiguities is mistaken. Another treatment of (70)’s multiplicity of readings involves domain restriction: if we restrict the domain of ‘a book’ to only one particular book, we can emulate the reading one would get from treating ‘a book’ as having wide-scope. Domain restriction traditionally is treated as a matter of context sensitivity rather than ambiguity. We thus have some reason to doubt that the right treatment of (70) has much to do with the phenomenon of scope. (see Schwartzchild (2002) for further discussion). 6.3 ModalsAs noted above, modals seem to come in various flavours (doxastic, metaphysical, logical, deontic, practical…). It is tempting to treat these as ambiguities involving the modal term. However, it is worth noting that other treatments abound. Kratzer (1983) treats modals as univocal but indexical: they get their differing interpretations by taking in different input sets of worlds and orderings induced on the relevant sets. If this is right, it may well be that what looks like an ambiguity should actually be treated as a matter of straightforward indexicality (much like ‘I’ is not ambiguous but indexical).The point of these examples is that it is often difficult to tell which theoretical treatment best explains a case of multiple interpretability. One must be cautious in one’s approach to these issues. It is all too easy to notice an apparent ambiguity, but often all too difficult to explain its nature. | |
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