Ambiguity
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[edit] Linguistic forms
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase contains in its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. "Meaning" hereby refers to whatever should be captured by a good dictionary. For instance, the word “bank” has several distinct lexical definitions, including “financial institution” and “edge of a river”. Another example is as in apothecary. You could say "I bought herbs from the apothecary." This could mean you actually spoke to the apothecary (pharmacist) or went to the apothecary (drug store).The context in which an ambiguous word is used often makes it evident which of the meanings is intended. If, for instance, someone says “I deposited $100 in the bank,” most people would not think you used a shovel to dig in the mud. However, some linguistic contexts do not provide sufficient information to disambiguate a used word. For example, "Biweekly" can mean "fortnightly" (once every two weeks - 26 times a year), OR "twice a week" (104 times a year). If "biweekly" is used in a conversation about a meeting schedule, it may be difficult to infer which meaning was intended. Many people[who?] believe that such lexically ambiguous, miscommunication-prone words should be avoided wherever possible, since the user generally has to waste time, effort, and attention span to define what is meant when they are used. Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a task referred to as Word Sense Disambiguation.
The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, and sometimes elaborate on their specific intended meaning (in which case, a less ambiguous term should have been used). The goal of clear concise communication is that the receiver(s) have no misunderstanding about what was meant to be conveyed. An exception to this could include a politician whose "wiggle words" and obfuscationconstituents with mutually exclusive conflicting desires from their candidate of choice. Ambiguity is a powerful tool of political science. are necessary to gain support from multiple
More problematic are words whose senses express closely related concepts. “Good,” for example, can mean “useful” or “functional” (That’s a good hammer), “exemplary” (She’s a good student), “pleasing” (This is good soup), “moral” (a good person versus the lesson to be learned from a story), "righteous", etc. “I have a good daughter” is not clear about which sense is intended. The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity (“unlockable” can mean “capable of being unlocked” or “impossible to lock”).
Syntactic ambiguity arises when a complex phrase or a sentence can be parsed in more than one way. “He ate the cookies on the couch,” for example, could mean that he ate those cookies which were on the couch (as opposed to those that were on the table), or it could mean that he was sitting on the couch when he ate the cookies.
Spoken language can contain many more types of ambiguities, where there is more than one way to compose a set of sounds into words, for example “ice cream” and “I scream.” Such ambiguity is generally resolved according to the context. A mishearing of such, based on incorrectly resolved ambiguity, is called a mondegreen.
Semantic ambiguity arises when a word or concept has an inherently diffuse meaning based on widespread or informal usage. This is often the case, for example, with idiomatic expressions whose definitions are rarely or never well-defined, and are presented in the context of a larger argument that invites a conclusion.
For example, “You could do with a new automobile. How about a test drive?” The clause “You could do with” presents a statement with such wide possible interpretation as to be essentially meaningless.[citation needed] Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. This form of ambiguity is closely related to vagueness.
Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law (see Ambiguity (law)), because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance.
[edit] Intentional application
Philosophers (and other users of logic) spend a lot of time and effort searching for and removing (or intentionally adding) ambiguity in arguments, because it can lead to incorrect conclusions and can be used to deliberately conceal bad arguments. For example, a politician might say “I oppose taxes that hinder economic growth.” Some will think he opposes taxes in general, because they hinder economic growth. Others may think he opposes only those taxes that he believes will hinder economic growth. In writing, the correct insertion or omission of a comma after “taxes” and the use of "which" can help reduce ambiguity here (for the first meaning, “, which” is properly used in place of “that”), or the sentence can be restructured to completely eliminate possible misinterpretation. The devious politician hopes that each constituent (politics) will interpret the above statement in the most desirable way, and think the politician supports everyone's opinion. However, the opposite can also be true - An opponent can turn a positive statement into a bad one, if the speaker uses ambiguity (intentionally or not). The logical fallacies of amphiboly and equivocation rely heavily on the use of ambiguous words and phrases.In literature and rhetoric, on the other hand, ambiguity can be a useful tool. Groucho Marx’s classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for example: “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.” Ambiguity can also be used as a comic device through a genuine intention to confuse, as does Magic: The Gathering's Unhinged © Ambiguity, which makes puns with homophones, mispunctuation, and run-ons: “Whenever a player plays a spell that counters a spell that has been played[,] or a player plays a spell that comes into play with counters, that player may counter the next spell played[,] or put an additional counter on a permanent that has already been played, but not countered.” Songs and poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the song title “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (where “blue” can refer to the color, or to sadness).
In narrative, ambiguity can be introduced in several ways: motive, plot, character. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the latter type of ambiguity with notable effect in his novel The Great Gatsby.
All religions debate the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of ambiguity. Christianity and Judaism employ the concept of paradox synonymously with 'ambiguity'. Ambiguity within Christianity[2] (and other religions) is resisted by the conservatives and fundamentalists, who regard the concept as equating with 'contradiction'. Non-fundamentalist Christians and Jews endorse Rudolf Otto's description of the sacred as 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans', the awe-inspiring mystery which fascinates humans.
Metonymy involves the use of the name of a subcomponent part as an abbreviation, or jargon, for the name of the whole object (for example "wheels" to refer to a car, or "flowers" to refer to beautiful offspring, an entire plant, or a collection of blooming plants). In modern vocabulary critical semiotics,[3] metonymy encompasses any potentially ambiguous word substitution that is based on contextual contiguity (located close together), or a function or process that an object performs, such as "sweet ride" to refer to a nice car. Metonym miscommunication is considered a primary mechanism of linguistic humour.[4
