Ambiguity in natural language: an investigation of certain problems in its linguistic description

Lingua 32 (1973) 95-118.

@Nxth-Holland

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REVIEW ARTICLE

Jan G. Kooij, Ambiguity in natural 1angua;;e: an investigation of certain problems in its linguistic description. Amsterdam and London: North-Holland, 197 1, pp. xii, 160. This intriguing but frustrating volume examines some conceptual problems surrounding the notion of ambiguity and criticizes various syntactic analyses from the generative literature.’ The first of these interests is pursued largely in the initial chapters, ‘Ambiguity in natural language’ and ‘Ambiguity and phonology: levels of representation’, and in the fifth and final chapter, ‘Ambiguity and the lexicon: some observations on polysemy’; specific criticisms are advanced in the third and fourth chapters, ‘Ambiguity and grammar: the concept of homonymy’ and ‘Ambiguity and grammar: the problem of neutralization,‘. Scattered throughout the sections are a number of’ interesting discussions - but most of them are inconclusive, and they are embedded in an ill-ordered matrix of conceptual analysis and historical commentary.

1. History and terminology The most striking defects of the book appear to follow from its origin as a doctoral dissertation. Thus, Kooij supplies the obligatory treatment of what other writers have had to say on his subject. In the case of a concept like ambiguity, the historical survey necessarily ranges far back in time (to ancient Greece, in fact) and over several academic fields (philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, plus linguistics from instrumental phonetics to semantics); it proceeds more or less chronologically, from Aristotle to George Lakoff (chapters l-3) and Kooij seems willing to mention just abou anything treating something

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called ambiguity. All this would be harmless, and might even have been illuminating, had not Kooij decided to use the historical survey to introduce pieces of the conceptual apparatus, and many of the examples, that he wants in later sections. The result. is satisfying neither as history nor as linguistics - not as history, because the ideas of each writer are wrenched out of their context, and not as linguistics, because the central problems concerning ambiguity in a grammar simply do not pop up in a logical sequence, nor are they formulated very clearly, when we view a chronological succession of topics and opinions. Kooij has tried to serve too many ends in one book. He could have given us a detailed history of ambiguity after the manner of the history of ideas, as atom is treated in Van Melsen (1952); or he could have collected and classified the uses of ambiguity, as Kroeber and ECluckhohn (1952) have examined the uses of culture; but either of these projects would have resulted in a book at least as iong as Kooij’s thesis. -What we need is a careful laying out of the conceptual difficulties at issue, the internal logic of the field, with the scope of the inquiry reasonably delimited and with the central notions clarified. Instead we find a series of suggestive formulations containing important but vague terms which are not made cle:ar until the last chapter, or are never analyzed. For example, in the introductory chapter, we read that ‘the main subject of this study will be ambiguity as a property of sentences and its consequences for a lingui’stic description’ (4) and ‘let us provisionally define ambiguity as that property of a sentence that it can be interpreted in more than one way’ (S), with the terms sentence and interpreted unclear; the first of these is then briefly defined - ‘I will understand by “sentence” any sequence of linguistic elements to which at least one grammatical structure can be assigned and which has at least one meaning’ (5) - in a. way that introduces the still vague notions grummatiea2 structure and meaning; shortly thereafter, matters are made worse by Kooij’s remark that “it would appear . . . that for linguistic purposes one net:ds a distinction between the ambiguity of sentences that, in abstraction. from context and situation also, inherently have more than one mean:ing ,I . . and the ambiguity of sefltences that do not have two meanings inherently but could still, in actual use, have more than one interpretaton’ (4-3, whilch uses meaning again and introduces the technical term interpretation (as well as context, situation, and use). In short, then, the problem of ambiguity has been reduced to prob-

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(and some additional concepts); but

meaning, interpretation, and ambiguity are three concepts of the same

order, all complex and var!ously understood by different writers. Only in the last chapter does the fog begin to lift some. The third paragraph there reorients the reader who has been relying on his own interpretation of interpretation : I believe it is necessary first of all to maintain a basic distinction between the content of a sentence and its interpretation. By the content of a sentence I will understand: the inherent semantic structure of a sentence as a type, such as is specified in a linguistic description. By the interpretation of a sentence I will understand the various ways in which one and the same sentence can be understood in each unique case of language use. It is unfortunate, 1 think, that the well-established term ‘interpretation’ is nowadays often used for what 1 refer to here as the inherent ‘content’ of a sentence.’ (117-8) ‘

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Unfortu&e i rdeed, since &is terminology should have been set forth back on page 5. Similarly, a considerable part of the book is taken up with different phenomena that might be labeled as cases of ambiguity - things called inherent ambiguity, neutrality, generality, neutralization, lack of specification, vagueness, indefiniteness of reference, polysemy, homonymy,

and so on - but these terms are very poorly distinguished. In chapter 4 we read a criticism of Bloomfield’s position on homonymy on the ground that ‘it does not allow for a distinction between accidental neutralization, functionally motivated neutralization, and neutrality in the sense of lack of specification or mere vagueness’ (106); but then Kooij goes on to speak of structural, fortuitous, systematic, unsystematic 01 indeterminate, and referen ti ambiguities (1 OS- 10) and doesn’t return to the distinctions of page 106 until he follows Chao in assuming ‘that the meaning of a lexical element is vague inasmuch as its range of referential application is not unambiguously delimited’ (11% In the meantime he has also distinguished between 6

(i) the inherent (ii) the possible ia.&!ar sentence, sentence in language .

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mean& of a lexical element - its full specification in the lexicon further specification of its inherent meaning in the context of a (iii) the possible further specification in the interpretation of a use.’ (118)

to which he refers a few pages later when he says that ‘the distinctions made above between inherent polysemy on the one hand and vagueness and generality on the other are a necessary prerequisite for the descrip-

tion of meaning of lexical elements’ (121). I believe that they are a necessary prerequisite and was irritated to find these issues examined a hundred pages too late in the book. I don’t think even the best-intentioned reader could work his way through lthe maze of terminology to an understanding of Kooij’s real opinions about the nature of syntactic and semantic repres’entation, the relation between words and things, the ways in which grammar, perception, and production differ, and related issues which might be central in a treatment of ambigui.ty. Moreover, Kooij’s early definition of ambiguity - ‘a sentence is inherently ambiguous when it is “same” on the level of phonological representation, but “different” (i) on the level of grammatical representation . . . or (ii) on the level of lexical representation only’ (8) - is odd in that it speaks of the phonological and syntactic (or lexical) levels, rather than, as is customary, the phonetic and semantic levels. As a result he is obligefd to engage in totally irrelevant discussions, such as cm-tinn iybaicfiL is ccncerned waittk“I” CIVI. 2.2.1 .I, .AIC nature of phonetic transcription and with acoustic cues for the :perception of linguistic elements. Finally, there is considerable discussion of ambiguity insofar as it concerns what people do when they understand sentences, Kooij’s position here being that ‘homonymous sentences’ are ‘a special category . . . both for linguistic description and for native speakers’ (60). He cites psycholinguistic evidence indicating that native speakers have trouble interpreting some ambiguous sentences. But this scarcely shows that ambiguous sentences are a special category in linguistic description, any more than the fact that people have trouble pronouncing tongue twistc:rs shows that they are a special catelgory in linguistic description. Tong-ae twisters are phrases or sentences with certain phonological properties, and seem to require no special marking to this effect. In any event, many ambiguous sentences do not cause interpretational difficulties, because only one reading is reasonable, likely, or expected.

2. Ambiguity and vagueness The central quevtion this book asks is: to what extent do different ‘interpretations’ of’ a sentence require representation in a linguistic analysis of that sentence? The answer given in the middle sections of ;he book is: probably less than transformational grammarians have been inclined to think. K.ooij examines in section 3.3 Lakoff’s claim that

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(1) I cut my finger with a knife. is ambiguous between an ‘accidental’ and a ‘purposive’ (or a ‘non-intentional’ and an ‘intentional’) rtiading; in section 4.1 .I. 1 he considers Bach’s contention that (2) the man with the camera is ambiguous between a present iense reading of the reduced relative clause and a ‘narrative’ tense (in which the tense of the clause is determined from the sentence in which (2) occurs); in section 4.2.1 he agrees with McCawley in criticizing the view that (3) my neighbor is ambiguous with respect to gender because it may be referred to by anaphotic elements of either gender: in section 4.1 he expresses doubts that sentences of the form NP Ved NP, v&/z NP, arise from a number of distinct deep structures (the following possibilities are canvassed: that wit/z NP, makes a noun phrase when co_mbined with NPZ ; that it is a complement to NP, ; that it is in construction with NP, ; that it modifies the remainder of the sentence); and in section 2.2.2.2, discussing emphatic and contrastive stress, in particular a proposal by Lu to assign tw. different structures to .1) John PLAYED. he finds it implausible to explain intonational differences by deep structural differences. In each case, Kooij’s remarks are provocative. Although many puzzling examples are adduced in tf-ic,se sections, the argumentation is feeble. We find passages like the following, contra Lakoff: ‘There is an ‘intentional’ and a ‘non-intentional’ interpretation of (69b) He cut his finger but when one tries to decide whether the one interpretation, or the other interpretation, or maybe both, hold in a sentence like (77) They frightened him things become rather cloudy.’ (82)

and contra Bach: ‘Thus,the

assumption that there is a ‘Narrative’ Tense in the underlying

Nominalexpression which takes the value sentence,only explains some interpretations,

structure of of the Tense element of t!le context of the There are others that are not explained by

it.’ (97)

and pro McCawley : ‘Of course, it is not easy to evaluate to what extent a sentence like (35b) My doctor lives next door

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is ambiguous for native speakers in the same way as the sen,tence ((3) He hit the man with the stick is. Hut even if it were the case that the one ambiguity is on occasion just as relevant as *- -- though I am inclined to doubt that this would be the case -, it is still a L;.; *Tf?* ,.&.‘r. perfectly reasonable requirement to impose on a linguistic description that it makes a distitzcr.h between the one ambiguit.y and the other ambiguity.* (108)

That is, it is hard to tell what to say about some examples, certain interpretations are quite unnatural in certain contexts (linguistic or othe+G.se), some sentences fee/! different from f?fhers, people differ in their judgments, there are other factors operative in many examples, and so on. But these complaints, accurate though they may be, just don’t bear on the question of whether specific sentences exhibit an ambiguity. Kooij’s discussions of iess probiernatic cases of ambiguity are much clearer and more conclusive; to my mind, these are the best parts of the book. The treatment of ‘constructional homonymy’ 5 la Hackett (1954) in section 3.2, for instance, is quite nice. Let us consici~~”I~U\T~ in some detail the problem of distinguishing ambiguity fro,m those sense differences that do not require semantic representation. There are c’lear cases on each side - the clearly ambiguous cases like (5) He hit th e man with the stick. (38, 67) (6) They saw her duck. (7) He cooked her goose. (8) The shooting of the hunters wa.s terrible. (40, 58) (9) Visiting relatives can be a nuisance. and the clearly unambiguous cases 1ik.e (10) He set up a private army. [recent past vs remote past] (11) She got every answer right. [personal knowledge vs hearsay] (12) My sister is the American consul in Rabat. [younger sister vs older sister 1 (13) I find many Japanese very interesting. [male Japanese vs female Japanese] In (lo)-( 13) our intuition is that thie sentences just don’t say anything about the distinctions mentioned, t.hat their semantic representations contain no elements encoding the distinctions. We will say that (lO)(13) are vague with respect to them .’ It is important to note that the unspecified would aho be appropriate terms, but 1 use vague in u sense it has some currency in the American generative literature. Vague may &o refer to referential fuzziness, as in the Chao quotation cited by Kooij. See also the djscus&m by Binnick (1969).

2 N&u~Zand because

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distinctions are ones that actually occur systematically in languages, so that it is not absurd to consider whether they function in English, in these examples in fact; we can exclude on this basis such problems as whether (5) might be ambiguous between reference to a maple stick and an ash stick, or whether (10) might be ambiguous between an army of 400 men and one of 4 10 men. With these preliminaries out of the way, we turn to the task of finding tests that will separate clear cases of ambiguity from clear cases of vagueness,3 and of seeing how far these facts can be extended to less clear examples. One test that will not work, in general, is that of adding additional material to sentences to force one understanding.4 Thus, it won’t do to claim that (10) can be ‘disambiguated’ by just or some time ago :

(14) He just set up a private army. (15) Some time ago he set up a private army. because if (10) is merely vague, then the added material will supply the necessary semantic content, whereas if it is ambiguous, the added material will select the necessary semarliiz content. Under special circumstances, however, added material zan be decisive; this happens when the distribution of the added material is very restricted, peculiar, and/or not explicable from semantic considerations only. For example, Lees (1960: 60) claims that sentences like (16) I know what he knows. arr ambiguous between an indirect question reading of what he knows and a free relative clause reading (roughly, what it is that he knows vs the (same) thing that he knows). Baker (1970) supports Lees’ position by pointing out that the word else requires ;m indirect question reading; therefore, (17) I know what else he knows. is understood only as an indirect question. But why should we depend on else if we can’t depend on just? The difference is that temporal just can occur with any sentence having specifiable semantic properties, whereas else is restricted to occurring with pronouns of a very small class ( the some words, like someone; the no words, like no one; the 3 My discussion of these tests owes a great deal to conversations with Jerrold M. Sadock; for a brief account of some of his ideas, see Sadock (1972). 4 I use understanding from here on to include both those elements of meaning that get coded in semantic structure and those that do not.

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any words, like anyo.ule; the every words, like everyone; and the &z words, like who). This is a s3/ntac& restriction, since even nouns like person and guy, which can be used for the same sort of indefinite reference as the pronouns (Some guy wants to see you, Someone wants to see YOU),require the proposed element other, insteald of the peculiar postposed else: (18) Some other guy wants to see you. (19) *Some guy else wants to see you. (20) Someone else wants to see you. (21) *Some other one wants to see you. Moreover, else is restricted to interrogative, as opposed to relative, wh words : (22) Who else did you see? (23) *The man who else I saw gave me a tip on the third race at Hialeah. Then the highly constrained distribution of eZ:Fesupports the claim that (16) has two distinct semantic interpretations. Call this the argument from special distribution. A second type of test appeals to the fact that sentences that are vague with respect to some distinction have otherwise quite similar understandings, and that the distinction in question must be the sort of thing that languages could plausibly be vague about. Consequently, the burden of proof is on anyone who insists that sentences like (S)-(7) are vague rather than ambiguous. Take (6), for instance. The distinction between the two understandings is that between two understandings of Kievduck - a bird belonging to a woman vs an action performed by a woman. There is not much in common here and it is quite implausible that a langua.ge might realize thLe distinction regularly, say by a morpheme associated with the verb. A similar argument a.pplies to idioms, as in (7). Call this the argument from j~~pZausjb~e dz’fferentiae. Another test depends on the: fa: i that, ceteris paribus, synonyms, near-synonyms, and (in general) semantically related lexical items have similar privileges of occurrence. In English, can and be able to, maple and tree, man and woman can be expected to occur in pretty much the same environments. If there is :a frarne in which they don’t, and if the difference can’t be attributed to such meaning differences as are present or to simple exceptionality, then th.e frame includes an idiom involving one of the items. This test can then be used to support arguments from implausible differentiae. For instance, (7) has two understandings, but

otherwise similar sentences witi bake for its hypernym cook, or with swan for goose, do not: (24b) He baked her goose. (25) He cooked her swan. We conclude that (7) is ambiguous, with both an idiomatic and a literal sense. Call this the argument from inconstant substitution. Related to this the most common type of test, and the one that Kooij depends on almost exclusively; it uses the fact that ambiguous sentences often have two different structures, both of which are independently visible. As Kooij puts it, ,

. . . if in a grammatical description, more than one structure, let us say, structures A and B, are assigned to one and the same sentence, there should be other sentences in that same language which within the framework of that same grammatical description unambiguously have the grammatical structure A, and other sentences, which unambiguously have the grammatical structure B.’ (67)

Thus, to show that (6) is ambiguous rather than vague, we exhibit unambiguous’ sentences like (26) They saw her

Erey (

(27) They saw her

lva:zer 1

(28) They saw fsrn 1

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duck. I

(29) They saw l$ duck. ( I and conclude that (6) represents two different patterns. Similarly, to show that (8) is ambiguous we observe that (30) Our shooting of the hunters was terrible. (31) The shooting of the bullets was terrible. (32) The shooting of the guns was terrible. are all unambiguous, and to show that (9) is ambiguous we observe that 5 Unambiguous in the relevant respect, of course. (26) is still ambiguous, since it can also describe habitual acts of sawing performed on birds.

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(331j Visiting them can be a nuisance. (341) Visiting relatives is a nuisance. (3 5) Visiting relatives are a nuisance. are all unambiguous. Call this the argument from intersection of patterm Kooij emphasizes this test so much that he is reluctant to recognize any systematic ambiguities that are not constructional homonymies. Certainly the examples that receive the greatest attention are of this type - (1), (2), and (4), f or example. As a result, I have some trouble in determining what position Kooij takes on many examples late in the book, as in this passage: ‘Consider the sentence (23) He looked at the plane This can mean that ‘he’ looked at a plane standing at the airport, or at the picture of a plane, or at a toy plane. This appears not to be a zounterexamp!e to the Katz and Foclor view, since we can say that these different interpretations are solely a function of reference. But that would be only partially true, since at least the interpretation ‘picture of is the result of the general and simple rule that some lexical elements can always be used and understood to refer to ‘the representation of -*, without therefore being elements that are inherently polysemous.’ (i41-2)

It is clear that he doesn’t intend nl[7rte to be several distinct lexical entries, all meaning ‘flying machine’, but it is not clear whether he thinks sentences with plane in them ze ambiguous. A test that Mooij hardly ever applies, but which is immensely valuable, uses transformational operations to detect ambiguities. If, thfz argument goes, the semantic structures for certain sentences lack specific2tion of some piece of meaning, then the applicability of transformations to them cannot possibly depend on whether or ngt this piece of meaning is present. That is, if a sentence is vague with respect tcl some distinction, this vagueness must be preserved by every transformational operation. Call this the argument from t~~~sfo~~at~o~~2potem rid. In his discussion of (5), Kooij uses this test. He says that ‘as in many cases of constructional homonymy, the presence of two alternative grammatical structures within one and the same sentence can . . . be illustrated by a change iq word-order’ (68). Although he never cites the exampie, his refence is t J (36) With the stick he hit the man. as a transformational variant of (5). (36) lacks one of the under-

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standings possible for (5). On the same page he provides cases of reduced relatives in subject position, which lack an understanding analogous to the understanding of (5) that (36) lacks. Again, for some reason, he doesn’t give the examples crucial for (S), which are sentences in which the man with the stick has been treated as a unit by transformations: (37) The man with the stick was hit by him. (38) The one he hit was the man with the stick. (39) It was the man with the stick that he hit. A special class of arguments from transformational potential uses certain rules that refer to identity of constituents - certain pronominalization and deletion rules ? The utility of conjunction reduction for this purpose has been recognized in generative grammar since Syntactic Structures, where it was used to determine the boundaries and type of a constituent (Chomsky 1957: 35-6); roughly, to be candidates for reduction, two sentences must be of the forms X - A - Y and X - B - Y, where A and B are constituents of the same type. The condition that A and B be of the same type can be used to distinguish ambiguity and vagueness, as in the case of (6). If (6) is ambiguous, then her duck in one understanding is not of the same type as her duck in the other (one is an NP consisting of Det and N, the other is the two constituents NP and V). The sentence (40) They saw her swallow. has the same two understandings. Consequently, conjunction reduction should be possible only when (6) and (40) have matching understandings. That is, (41) They saw her duck and (her) swallow. should have two understandings, not four, which is correct. Correspondingly, (42) I find many Koreans very interesting. has the same two understandings as (13); but the reduced sentence (43) I find many Koreans and (many) Japanese very interesting. has four understandings - including the crossed un erstanding referring to malt Koreans and female Japanese, or to female Koreans and male Japane, - showing that (13) is vague rather than ambiguous. 6 More precisely, what have come to be known as identity-of-sense rules, as opposed to pronominalizations and deletions that require identity of reference; contrast the identity of sense expressed by one in I chewed a pencil, and she chewed one too with the identity of reference expressed by it in I chewed a pencil, and she chewed it too.

Conjunction reduction provides an even more stringent test COEceming the material X and Y which must be identical (not just of the same type). For example, suppose that (6) is vague, rather than ambiguous, with respect to whether a bird or an action is referred to, and that (44) They heard her duck. is correspondingly vague; then (45) They saw and heard her duck. should have four understandings, rather than two, because the identity condition on conjunction reduction can’t require identity of elements that aren’t part of semantic structure. But (45) has two understandings (either bird or action throughout), not four; hence it is ambiguous rather than vague. Compare this result with that for (10): both (10) and (46) He se:t up a research foundation. e understood as reporting an action in the recent or remote past. The reduced conjunction (47) He set up a private army and a research foundation. has all four understandings, as we can see by appending the appropriate contextual information: (48) He set up a private army twenty years ago and a research foundation last night. (49) He set up a private army last night and a research foundation twenty years ago. \;Jould be contradictory if their crossed understandings were barred by r’ileidentity condition on conjunction reduction.’ Other deletion-upon-identity transformations give the same results fr:bfexample, Gapping, as in (50) He called her a cab and she a dog-cart. which has only two understandings, even though (5 1) He called her a cab. (52) She called her a dog-cart. each have two; and VP Deletion, as in (53) I wouldn’t call her a cab, but George might. Lakoff (1970) has increased the stock of rule tests by reference to other identity transformations, in particular a rule that yields so, as in (54) I called her a cab, and so did George. 7 (49) is sightly odd because of its progression backwards in time; but it is not contradictory.

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to which we may add the rule that gives do SO as a pro-form for activity VPs: (55) I called her a cab, but George wouldn’t do so. and the negative correspondents to the so rule: (56) I wouldn’t 41 h er a cab, and neither would George. (57) I’d call h er a cab, but not George. among others. The significance of these rule tests is that, insofar as they are applicable, they correctly categorize the clear cases of ambiguity and the clear cases of vagueness, so that they can be extended into the grey areas. Consider example (3) my neigrhbor. Kooij claims that (3) is not ambiguous, but vague, with respect to gender, because sentences with (3) in them ‘do not appear ambiguous at all for native speakers’ (107). A very weak reason - but in spite of this the conclusion is supported by arguments from identity transformations: (58) My neighbor is talkative, and so is yours. allows all four possible distributions of genders to our neighbors, although the SOtransformation has applied, and (59) My neighbor is virile, yours a real lady. isn’t contradictory, even though Gapping has applied and the added material forces one of the crossed understandings. I conclude that (3) is vague, and that whatever it is about phrases like (3) that permits two different kinds of anaphora, as in (60) My neighbor introduced herself. (61) My neighbor introduced himself. it is not a matter of two different semantic structures associated with (3) The problem of intentional vs non-intentional readings of sentences like (1) is considered by Lakoff, who applies the identity test with SO and adds that at least one language, Cupe”no, appears to distinguish volitional vs non-volitional understandings by morphological means, so that the differentia is not implausible. Unfortunately, Lakoff’s first problematic example, (62) John hit the wall. seems to involve a difference in understanding beyond that of intentionality - namely, whether John’s body or his fist hit the wall - so that we have to figure out whether the meaning difference arises from the distinction intention vs non-intention, from two different understandings of the subject (Alhrt vs Johrz’s body), from two different

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understandings of hit (i.e. two distinct sorts qf actions demibed by the same verb), from some difference in deleted adverbials (~ille his fist vs with his body, or either of these vs no adverbial element in semantic structure), or from some combination of these. The double difference in understanding of (62) has been observed by Catlin and Catlin (197% who go on to claim that verbs are only vague with respect to volition They claim, first, that even cases like (1) I cut my finger with a knife. describe different physical acts, here ‘nicking [the] arm while peeling potatoes versus . . . gouging [the] arm to the bone’ (Catlin and Catlin 1972: 507): It seems to me that both nicks and gouges are describable by (l), and that there is no correlation between intentionality and the +ll\,La-. depth of the cut, +t, &liar t 1 r US all fo*urpossible understandings. On reductions wieh so, moreover, Catlin and Catlin disagree directly with Lakoff, who claims that (63) John cut his arm with a knife and so did Harry. ‘can involve wo purposeful, or two accidental, cuttings. But [(63)] cannot mean t:hat John accidentally nicked his arm (while slicing potatoes) and Harry purposefully slashed away at his, nor the reverse’ (Lakoff 1970: 359); the Catlins say that in (63), Harry, ‘in a particularly violent episode of sleep-walking can have nonvolitionally . . . cut his arm with a. knife, in a manner sufficiently similar to John’s parallel intentional actions that the conjunction with SO + AU is perfectly acceptable’ (Catlin and Catlin op. cit.: 507). The question is then whether sentences like (64) John, intending to commit suicide, cut his arm with a knife, and SO did Harry, who accidentally ran into a bread knife while sleep-,walking. are peculiar aecause they involve an internal self-contradiction. My own grammaticality judgment on (64) is that it merits at best a question mark; it would be interesting to have a serious survey of judgments on sentences like these. But the facts are even more complex. The Catlins say that (65) Bruce stumbled coming down the stairs and so did Herb. may report a situation in which ‘Bruce may have drunk too much to make his way down a flight of stairs without mishap. Herb wants to demonstrate how clumsy Bruce looked coming down the stairs and repeats Bruce’s performanile, this time stumbling on purpose’ (Catlin and Catlin op. cit.: 506). They would therefore be obliged to say that

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(66) Bruce, th e d runken oaf, stumbled coming down the stairs, and so did Herb, who was cruelly making fun of Bruce. isn’t odd. As it happens, I agree with the judgment here, and agree also that (65) can have the crossed understanding nonvolitional-volitional. However, I find the other crossed understanding, volitional-nonvolitional, much more difficult; correspondingly (67) Bruce, illustrating how he portrayed a drunk on stage, stumbled coming down the stairs, and so did Herb, who was so interested in the demonstration that he wasn’t looking where he was going. strikes me as quite strange. For stumble I accept one of the crossed senses and reject the other, for cut I reject them both, (64) as well as (68) John, accidentally running into a bread knife while sleep-walking, cut his arm with a knife, and so did Harry, who tried to commit suicide. Finally, different identity tests yield different results. Conjunction reduction and Gapping appear to give more stringent tests than SOand do so; (69) John and Harry (both) cut their arms.

(70) John cut his arm, and Harry his leg. seem to me quite impossible with either of the crossed understandings. Other speakers may differ in their judgments, but there are some generalizations possible : If one crossed sense is judged better than the other, it will be the unmarked-marked sense, never the marked-unmarked one. If some rules are more stringent than others, they will be deletion rules (conjunction reduction, Gapping, VP Deletion) rather than pro-ing rules (so, do so, neither, etc.). These tentative generalizations need much further exploration8 In the meantime, we should note that the decision between ambiguity and vagueness in the case of volitional understandings of verbs is especially difficult. It may be necessary to make different decisions for different 8 In an unpublished paper Sadock and 1 examine a set of cases in which one wouldn’t want to postulate a distinction in semantic structure, but for which the identity tests predict an ambiguity - whether a sentence is a joke or not, whether it’s an insult or not, whether a phrase is metaphorical or not, and so on. There is some variation in the way people judge these examples, but they obey the generalizations. Thus, Your sister is ugly, and so is your brother is never judged to contain an insult followed by a statement of fact, although some speakers permit the reverse. Our paper is an attempt to characterize the cases in which identity tests anomalously predict ambiguity rather than vagueness.

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verbs (cut vs stumble above) and for different speakers (Lakoff appears to allow fewer crossed senses than I do, and the Catlins more). Neither of these analytical moves would be unprecedented, but to the extent that they are required they prevent any simple answer to the question: is (1) ambiguous or vague? Identity tests have been much used in the recent literature; typical illustrations are the argt ment that (7 1) Ken drives a truck. is ambiguous, not vague, between a habitual and an occupational reading (Lawler 1972: 250), and the argument that (72) Miranda hammered a coatha.nger. is vague, not ambiguous, with respect to whether the resultant state is flatness or straightness (Green 1972: 92). Other authors have cautiously avoided the ambiguity/vagueness issue or have made what now seems to be the wrong decision. Heinlimaki’s recent treatment of before clauses like the one in (73) John shut up before Harry got mad at him. tries “to’ show that the context determines which one - the beforeclause or its negation - i:; understood to be a valid inference’ (Heir& maki 1972: 14Q), without taking a stand on whether the two understandings of (73) are distinct in semantic represcl,:ation. AA identity test indicates ambiguity; (74) John shut up before Ha:ry got mad at him, and so did Chuck. doesn’t allow the crossed understandings (in which Harry didn’t get mad at John but did at Chuck, or the reverse). For a mistake, I offer my claim (Zwicky 1969) that (75) Myron became the tallest member of his far lily. is ambiguous, describing either a change in Myron or 2 change in his external circumstances (the taller members of his family might have died, for example). But (76) Myron becarr.e the tallest member of his family, and so did Marlon. allows the crossed understandings. In another set of cases, a writer’s claim of ambiguity could have been bolstered by an identity test. For example, when Elliott (197 1: 17-20) dis5nguishes embedded ex Aamations from embedded questions he cites the ambiguity of (77) John knows what lies Charles tells. which can be supported by the observation that

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(78) Jt3hn knows what lies Charles tells, and so does Sam. lacks the crossed understandings. And Postal’s assertion that some of his remind examples are ambiguous between ‘perceive as similar’ and ‘cause to remember’ readings (Postal 1970: 38) gains support from the fact that (79) Harry reminded me of my gorilla, and so did George. lacks the crossed understandings. In some situations the identity tests are of no help. For instance, it has been claimed that verbs like mtxipate, report, announce, and remember ‘have no specification in the lexicon as to whether their complements are factive’ (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970: 163) so that they are lexically vague. We may then ask whether sentences with such verbs, like (80) The lieutenant reported that the culprit had fled. are ambiguous or vague. Indeed, the crossed understandings of (81) The lieutenant and the sergeant reported that the culprit had fled. are peculiar, but this is so for independent reasons: the factive understanding implies the nonfactive, and if we try to take the nonfactive understanding to be specifically counterfactive, then (8 1) presupposes contradictory beliefs on the part of its speaker. Arguments that (80) is ambiguous must lroceed on other grounds. An especially ir,teresting example is the Lakoff and Peters (1969) treatment of phrasal conjunction, by which both (82) John and Martha left. (83) John and Martha are married. are analyzed as ambiguous between sentential conjunction and phrasal conjunction, the latter corresponding to structures like (84) John left (together) with Martha. (85) John is married to Martha. respectively. But, as David Dowty, Larry Martin, and Carlota Smith have communicated to me, (25) John and Martha left, and so did Dick and Pat. (87) John and Martha are married, and so are Dick and Pat. have different properties: (86) allows the crossed understandings, while

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(87) does n0t.g Onle final application of an identity test. Dahl (1972) argues that sentences like ($$) I%11;oves his wife, and so does Harry. in which Harry can be understood to love his own wife or Bill’s, are not ambiguous (as assumed by all other writers on the subject), but vague. Dahl’s conclusion runs counter to thie results of the identity test, howevs*r a ” 3 (89) Bill lov es his wife, and so does Harry, and the same thing goes for Sam anal Mike. has several understandings, but not one in which Harry loves Bill’s wife while Sam and Mike each love their own, or the one in which Bill and Harry each love their own wives while Mike loves Sam’s, both of which should be possible if (88) is vague with respect to whose wife Harry loves. I have gone through such a longtreatment of ambiguity tests ‘because it seems to me that claims of ambiguity are central to virtually every claim about transformations in the current literature, especially to the controversial ones. ‘Thus, discussions of Neg-Transportation hinge on whether (90) I don’t think she’s bald. is ambiguous; arguments about Tough Movement depend on whether (91) It’5 a snap to play Bach keybo’ard concerti on a harpsichord. has thsi;readings of (92) Bach keyboard coxerti are a snap to play on a harpsichord. (93) A harpsichord is a snap to play Bach keyboard concerti on. both; while Psych Movement involves the question of whether (94) Dracula surprised us.

9 Dowty and Sa d 0 ck have pointed out to me that two of the Lakoff-Peters

arguments for the ambiguity of sentences like (82) are fallacious; they are also examples of two of the ambiguity tests above (their main argument uses uttersection of patterns). First, there is an attempt at a special distribution argument, based on the observation that (82) can occur with either both and together (but not both) and that the presence of one of these items ‘disambigu ates’ (82) (Lakoff and Peters: 1 LS)..This is an argument from distribution but not from special ciistribution; it is just like just and some time ago, and not (apparently) like else. Then there is an implicit argument from transformational potential (Lakoff ana Ners: 115, 119-20): it is observed that the rules of Preposition Adjunction and Conjunct Movement apply on:y to the phr;asal conjunction understanding of (82), to yield (84). But the only justification for these rules is the claim of paraphrase between (84) and one understanding of (82), SO that the argument is circular. Demonstrations using transformational potential obviously cannot rely on ruZ4~s whose existence is supported only by examples of the type in question.

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is ambiguous between an Agent and some other reading for the subject (which is not necessarily the same question as whether (1) is ambiguous lvith respect to volition): analysis of noun phrases and complements leads us to worry whether the two understandings of (95) Herbert said that the man from Boston was a celebrated Ruritanian patriot. according to which the description title marl from Boston is attributable to either HIerbert or the speaker of (95), should receive representation in semantic structure; trying to describe conjunction forces us to consider whether (96) Susan went to the store and bought a bottle of whiskey. has both a symmetric and an asymmetric reading (only the first permitting exchange OCconjuncts without a change in sense); and discussions of sentence types, speech acts and performative verbs turn on whether examples like *- -. ___. (Y7) Why don’t you ask her for help? (98) Could Jane fly your plane to Taxco? (99) Close the curtains and I’ll turn on the lights. each have several different semantic representations (as question and suggestion, at least question and offer, and at least promise and warning, respectively). All this argumentation is about ambiguities, and problematic ones at that. Tests for ambiguity are consequently of tremendous importance.

3. Homonylmyand polysemy I turn now to another central topic, treated in the last chapter of Ambiguity 1:nnatural language: the distinction between homonymy and polysemy. Here is another ancient vexed question. Kooij’s position is that ‘the distinction between “inherent polysemy” and other forms of ambiguity is’ more of a guiding principle than a concept that can be used a priori, and the boundary is difficult to establish’ (118). Further confounding the analyst is the question of which aspects 0’ meaning are to be assigned to a lexical item and which are to be explained as a product of the context in which the item occurs. Next he must give some account of idioms and of the differences between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world. There is, finally, the issue of how to incorporate into a grammar generalizations about relationships

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among the senses of lexical items. The five problem areas, and the ambiguity/vagueness question, are connected in complex ways, SO that it is too much to hope that a chapter of 39 pa.ges will answer all the riddles for us. Without coming to any definite conclusions, Kooij reviews the relevant material and gives us some examples to think about. Section 5.3.1 is a brief criticism of early Katz-Fodor lexical entries, stressing their failure to distinguish polysemy from homonymy (almost any two meanings will have SOW-Eelement in common) and to place together related senses (different pairs of related senses often share different features, a fict that cannot be shown by hierarchical arrangements of semantic features). Section 5.4.2 summarizes Bolinger’s observation that Katz ant’ Fodor’s methods for deciding wY:atbelongs in a semantic representatiiln lead to ‘an endless transference of features from Distinguisher stzltus to Marker status until the Distinguisher mate’ 1 IS * exhausted’ (134-5). 1 O Xooij might have added that Katz-Fodor real semantic representations are essentially unstructured, a criticism stressed by Generative Semanticists, who point out that lexical items like convince and derty have internal structure - roughly cause to believe and asw-t not, respectively, neither of them a mere combination of semantic elements (deny, for instance, doesn’t mean not assert, nor does it refer to an act that is both negation and assertion). The structure of lexical entries only makes the polysemy/homonymy problelil more difficult tc6 cope with, since the elements shared by two senses of a lexical item will sometimes appear in different parts of the structures. An excellent survey of the perplexities surrounding the notion related lexical entry is provided by Green (1969), who pcints out that unlikely may have both the entries not likely and likely not, that the recurrence in various languages of related senses realized by a single lexical item is surely not an accident, and that a certain amount of anaphora between different, but related, senses of lexical items is possible (so that there is an additional complication in the use of identity tests). The ‘-tire of Kooij’s criticism of Katz and Fodor is his assertion that ‘It is not the primary goal of a semantic theory to give a semantic representation of the various senses of lexical elements, and it is certainly not its only goal. What a semantic theory should be concerned with, first of all, is to try to define s~rne structure among these senses by formulating the principles by which these senses are related; and to decide to what extent these same principles are operative in the formation of the content of a sentence and in its further specifications in the context.* (139) lo Clearly, this defect in the Katz-Fodor system has to do with the distinction between linguistic knowledge and factual knowledge. See the elegant discussion by Fillmore (1969: 91-4).

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Indeed, and I -wish he had more to say on the subject than the few pages that follow. How to decide what to allot to context and what to semantic representation has not been very carefully examined; ambiguity/ vagueness tests bear on the matter (see Sadock 1972), and there is some methodological discussion by Alston (197 1: sec. 2) but most writers seem to approach the subject with a preconceived idea of what belongs where. Katz and Fodor hel’d the position that each sentence is potentially ambiguous in a finite number of ways, and that appropriate readings are selected from these by context., and they inclined to put rather a lot into semantic representation. Mooij is more parsimonious and also feels that ‘the readings of a sentence in isolation are only a subset of the readings it can have in language use’ ( 1141). I can think of several ways to interpret Kooij’s position, none of them very satisfactory. If by reading he meant what I have used, the term understanding for, then his remark doesn’t concern semantic representations and is surely false. More likely, Kooij believes that contexts somehow add semantic representations to sentences, an interpretation suggested by an earlier remark: ‘Kraak...opposes the “contextual” view of homonymy and observes that it is inconceivable that context should introduce structures that are not present. On this, .I agree with him (though it is another question as to whether it is true in all cases of ambiguity)’ (6 1; italics mine). What is missing is any account of how this semantic expansion in context might operate; it is easy enough to imagine how context can specify elements about which a sentence is vague, but harder to see how context might manipulate or transform structures. The mere assertion that this is the way things are will not do, especially if the assertion is not buttressed by 1inguisti.c arguments about what belongs in semantic representations. In general, anyone can speculate on the meaning of sentences, but the real constraints on what is alloted to semantic representations come from syntactic considerations; we assign to semantic structure only what we must, true, but syntax is a prime indicator of what our obligaticns are. Kooij’s parsimony leads him to treat as vague some examples that surely are ambiguous, for example (100) The marine captain liked his new position. (140) (rank vs location).* And although he maintains he is not defending the notion of Gesamtbedeutung (89), he repeatedly shies away from systematizing semantic distinctions and, as in the discussion of with constructions in chapter 3, refuses to countenance analyses which assume extensive ambiguities.

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i’he treatment of idiomaticity in section 5.3.2 is straightforward and intelligent. A few pages later Kooij considers what should be done when understandings of lexical items are regularly related, as are the understandings of see in (101) He sees you. (102) He sees well in the. dark. (present state vs ability). In this case, as in the case of astronomical star vs star ‘asterisk’ and arboreal tree vs tree ‘phrase-marker’, Kooij alludes to an account in terms of a rule that treats one of the understandings as primary and the other as derived as a ‘contextual speci;Jization’ (13940). Again, it is hard to know what to make of this suggestion, since it isn’t pursued further cr exposed in detail. The relationSship between see in (101) and (102) would be treated by most transformational syntactialans as a fully gp~__~.at,ized &st,ir?r,tion - tn arrnlln+ed fcr either by b” he “V UVY”6.eI.b a transformation taking can V to V in specified structures or by the postulation of two lexical items Pres(ent), one meaning ‘present state’, the other ‘ability’. The cases of star and tree, wltich Kooij refers to rules that supply the senses ‘a conventional representation of _’ and ‘something being alike to ___-) under one of its aspects’, respectively, seem quite different. Certainly there are principles by which speakers can extend words to new situations - generalization, specialization, similarity, etc. - but this doesn’t show that the words then have only one semantic representation. The result might be several distinct readings whose relationship happens to be in some sense ‘natural’, or it might be several readings associated by rules generating some lexical items from others, if the necessity for such lexicon-internal processes can be demonstrated. Once more, the choice among several alternatives requires a careful sifting of the evidence bearing on it.

4. Conchsion

I have had some rather harsh things to say about Ambiguity in natural language. Kooij tries to do too many things in less than 150 pages of text; he touches, at one place or another, on every fundamental issue in linguistic semantics and manages also to review quite a lot of literature’ s and to run through some problems of pragmatics, stylistics, and 1 1 By my earlier references to a number of recent articles I did not mean to criticize Kooij’s coverage. So far as I can see, ali of this material appeared too late for Kooij to have seen it before publication.

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perception. The book bounces from one topic to another, with no visible purpose and with Kooij’s opinions deferred for pages or kept from the reader. Much of it is inconclusive in style or in substance, and conceptual unclarities abound. As a result, what might have been a valuable survey of the topic of ambiguity is illuminating in places but disappointing on the whole. The book ends on an especially unfortunate note: having early on defined ambiguity as the possession of distinct grammatical or lexical structures by one sentence - that is, as a matter of lilrguistic specifications - he trips over his own terminology and concludes that ‘we can argue over where the boundary [between interpretation and content] has to be drawn, but I think we can hardly doubt that ambiguities have no end, whereas linguistic specifications have’ (146). _A,mold_ M 7wickv *.a5 d “‘d”,

Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A.

References Alston, W.P., 197 1. How does one tell whether a word has one. several or many senses! in: Steinberg and Jakobovits (eds.), Semantics. London: CambriQe !!niv press, 35-47. Baker, C.L., 1970. Notes on the description of English questions: th ;Jle of an abstract question morpheme. Found. Lang. 6, I 97--:!19. Binnick, RI., 1970. Ambiguity and vagueness. CLS 6, 147-53. Catlin, J.-C. and .I. Catlin, 1972. Intentionality~: a source of ambiguity in English? Linguist. Inq. 3, 504-8. Chomsky, N., 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton (Janua Linguarum, Series Minor, no. 4). CLS X. Papers from the Xth regional meeting, C?ucago Linguistic Society. University of Chicago: Dept. of Linguistics. Dahl, o., 1972. On so-called ‘sloppy identity’. Gothenburg Pap. Theor. Linguist. llElliot, D., 1971. The grammar of emotive and exclamatory sentences in English. Ohio State University: Working Papers in Linguistics 8, viii- 110. Fillmore, C.J., 1969. Verbs of judging: an exercise in semantic description. Pap. Linguist. 1, 91-115. Green, G.M., 1969. On the notion “related lexical item”. CLS 5, 76-88. Green, G.M., 1972. Some observations on the syntax and semantics of instrumental verbs. CLS 8, 83-97. Hein’aim%i, Cl., 1972. Before. CLS 8, 139-51. Hackett, C.F., 1954. Two models of grammatical description. Word 10, 210-31. Kiparsky, P. and C. R&m&y, 1970. Fact. In: M. Bierwisch and K.E. Heidolph (eds.), Progress .. in hguistics.The Hague: Mouton, 143-73.

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Kroeber, A.L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 67.1, Harvard University. NW Yo1.k: Vintage Books. Lakoff, G., 1970. A na*.e tin vagueness and ambiguity. Linguist. Inq. 1,357-g. Lakoff, G. and P.S. Feters, 1963. Phrasal conjunction and symmetric predicates. In: D.A. R&be1 and S.A. Wane (eds.), Modem studies in English. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHail, 113-42. Lawler, J., 1972. Generic to a fault. CLS 8, 247-58. Lees, R.B., 1960. The grammar of English nominahzations. IJAL 26.3, part II. Postal, P.M., 1970. On the surface verb ‘remind’. Linguist. Inq. 1, 37-l 20. Sadock, J.M., 1972. Speech act idioms. CLS 8,329-39. Van Meken, A.G., 1952. From afomos to atom: the history of the concept atom. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press. New York: Harper and Row (1960). Zwicky, A.M., 1969. A note on becoming. CLS 5,293~4.