Ambiguity in Linguistics

AMBIGUITY IN LINGUISTICS1
Jordi Fortuny & Lluıs Payrat

o
Abstract. Ambiguity is conventionally defined in Linguistics as a property of a

word or an utterance that has two meanings or two interpretations, and is usually
classified as lexical, morphological, syntactic (or structural), and pragmatic.
Giving an adequate definition of linguistic ambiguity is not trivial, nor is there
unanimity in accepting it. Most researchers tend to agree that ambiguity should
be distinguished from related concepts such as vagueness, context sensitivity,
reference transfer, and underdetermination or generality of meaning. The
distinction between these concepts is also related to the divergences or
connections between the perspectives of analysis of ambiguity, and the aim of
each work.
In this introduction, we define the limits of ambiguity with respect to related
concepts and summarize the studies contained within this special issue. These
studies do not cover all possible approaches to linguistic ambiguity, but provide a
broad overview that can be useful in different fields. We trust that they will
contribute to deepening into a phenomenon that is not yet well described and that
seems to be consubstantial with the use of language.
1. Introduction
In Linguistics, it is customary to consider that a linguistic expression is
ambiguous when it can be analyzed in multiple ways in a given level of
linguistic representation (Sennet 2021; Wasow 2015, 2005). We thus find
cases of lexical ambiguity, morphological ambiguity, syntactic (or
structural) ambiguity, and pragmatic ambiguity.
For instance, can in (1) is either an auxiliary verb (1a) or a countable
noun (1b); the suffix –s in (2) is a plural marker on nouns (2a), a third
person marker of the simple present tense of regular verbs (2b), or a
genitive marker (2c); the PP from Paris in (3) is attached either to the
NP boys or the NP coordination girls and boys; and finally the sentence
in (4) could be an assertion, a warning, or an expression of relief. The
following examples provide instances of lexical ambiguity (1),
morphological ambiguity (2), syntactic ambiguity (3), and pragmatic
ambiguity (4).
1
This work has been supported by the research project PID2019-104453GA-I00 of the
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci on and the research project 2021SGR01084 of the Agencia
de Gestio d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca.
Studia Linguistica ••(•) 2023, pp. 1–7. © 2023 The Authors. Studia Linguistica published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on
behalf of Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
14679582, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/stul.12221, Wiley Online Library on [30/01/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
2 Jordi Fortuny & Lluıs Payrat
o
Given that ambiguity is pervasive in natural languages utterances

(Wasow 2005; Martin et al. 1987), it is important for Linguistics to
understand what types of ambiguity exist (Senet 2021; Wasow 2015), why
natural languages are ambiguous (Levinson 2000; Piantadosi et al. 2012;
Fortuny and Corominas-Murtra 2013), and how speakers manage to
choose the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous expression integrating
different types of analysis mechanisms (Crain and Steedman 2010;
Frazier 1987; MacDonald et al. 1994; Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995).
It must be said that the proper definition of linguistic ambiguity is not
trivial, although researchers tend to agree that ambiguity must be
distinguished from vagueness (Fara 2000; Kennedy 2019), context
sensitivity (Donaldson and Lepore 2012), reference transfer (Nun-
berg 1978; Ward 2004), and generality of sense (Zwicky and
Sadock 1975). Let us briefly illustrate these phenomena before presenting
the contributions of this volume.
Typically, adjectives denote vague predicates; we say, for instance, that
tall denotes a vague predicate because there exist borderline cases for
which it is not possible to determine whether they satisfy the property
denoted by tall. In this sense, tall is not ambiguous, because it has a single
interpretation, but the predicate it denotes is vague. Note that, whereas
ambiguity is a property of a linguistic expression, vagueness is a property
of the predicate denotated by a linguistic expression: if a linguistic
expression is ambiguous, then it has more than one interpretation or
analysis, and if a predicate p (denoted by a linguistic expression) is vague,
then there are certain individuals for which it cannot be decided whether
or not they satisfy p.2
2
Note that, occasionally, we may say that the adjective tall is vague; we say so because the
predicate it denotes is vague and, somehow, we consider that the properties of the
denotation of a linguistic expression are also properties of such a linguistic expression. But,
crucially, when we say that the suffix -s is ambiguous, this is not because its denotation is
ambiguous, but rather because it can be assigned multiple denotations.
© 2023 The Authors. Studia Linguistica published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Editorial Board of Studia
Linguistica.
Ambiguity in linguistics 3
It is also uncontroversial that the content of certain utterances

(particularly with deictics) is context sensitive; for instance, the utterance
I am tired varies contextually because I is context sensitive. I is not
ambiguous, since it refers unequivocally to the utterer of the expression
that contains I, but shifts its reference. Indeed, the intriguing property of
context sensitive terms is that they convey a single meaning that can be
associated with multiple references.
The limits, on one hand, between ambiguity and reference transfer, and
on the other hand, between ambiguity and generality of sense are
sometimes less precise. Let us introduce two relatively uncontroversial
examples. Consider examples (5) and (6).
If a server utters (5) to a co-worker, then she refers “indirectly to the

person who ordered the ham sandwich via the ham sandwich itself”
(Ward 2004: 262). Strictly, the multiplicity of meaning presented by ham
sandwich is not a case of ambiguity, because the person ordering a ham
sandwich is not part of the conventional meaning of ham sandwich, but a
case of reference transfer. We leave aside now whether the case can also
be interpreted as a metonymy; the question about ambiguity would not
be affected.
The utterance (6) can be interpreted in different ways if the speaker has
two or more brothers and the hearer knows it. Indeed, the hearer cannot
decide which brother exactly got sick, unless some extra information is
provided. Again, this multiplicity of meaning is not strictly an instance of
ambiguity, because the term brother has a precise meaning: x is a brother
of y if (and only if) x is a male and x and y share at least one parent.
Therefore, brother is not ambiguous, but its meaning is general enough to
permit multiple interpretative possibilities. As noted with respect to
vagueness, generality of meaning is a property of the denotation of a
linguistic expression, (whereas ambiguity is a property of the linguistic
expression but not of the denotation of a linguistic expression).
The objective of this thematic issue is to gather several works that
investigate linguistic ambiguity from different perspectives. In some
cases, the investigation of the borders between ambiguity and the other
phenomena just mentioned is crucial. We summarize the contributions
contained within the volume.
Elena Castroviejo, Marta Ponciano, Jose V. Hernandez-Conde, and
Agustın Vicente investigate from a developmental perspective the
comprehension of expressions that can be interpreted both literally and
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nonliterally in Spanish. More precisely, they focus on the interpretation

of expressions whose nonliteral meaning is more frequent than its literal
meaning, such as light verb constructions (to make the bed) and figurative
constructions in a metaphor-hyperbole-idiom continuum (to sleep with
angels). They run an experiment with children aged 3 to 9 in order to test
the following two hypotheses: (a) nonliteral interpretations are preferred
over literal interpretations when nonliteral interpretations are more
frequent and (b) performance at the literal reading improves with age.
Interestingly, the results of their experiment indicate an interesting
divide: on one hand, youngest groups are more accurate at the literal
than at the nonliteral interpretation of light verb constructions, and on
the other hand, all groups perform better at the nonliteral than at the
literal interpretation of figurative constructions.
Jordi Fortuny is concerned with structural or syntactic ambiguity. He
observes that there are two basic types of structural ambiguity:
constituent ambiguity and chain formation ambiguity. Fortuny splits
constituent ambiguities into two different subtypes: bracketing ambigu-
ities and labeling ambiguities. In brief, bracketing ambiguities appear
when there are two potential attachment sites for a constituent, labeling
ambiguities appear when there are two labeling possibilities for a
constituent, and chain formation ambiguities appear when there are two
potential reconstruction sites for a constituent. Crucially, the author
illustrates how structural and chain formation ambiguities interweave in
a rather intricate way, yielding strings of symbols for which there exist
globally different structural parses. Fortuny remarks that certain
movement locality constraints sometimes reduce chain formation
ambiguities, but he concludes that movement locality constraints are
not functionally motivated to reduce chain formation ambiguities.
Finally, the author argues that the locus of structural ambiguity within
the architecture of Language is the PF (Phonetic Form) branch. The data
analyzed within this article come from English and Catalan.
Ricardo Maldonado departure point is the observation that se
constructions in Spanish can be interpreted in many ways; crucially,
they can be interpreted as passive, as impersonal, and as middle
constructions. Maldonado provides basic criteria to distinguish passive
and impersonal interpretations of se constructions, reviews the validity of
traditional arguments for analyzing se constructions as passives, and
develops an analysis for impersonal constructions in Cognitive Grammar
terms. The author also provides a usage-based description of se
constructions for four Mexican Spanish corpora. Based on analysis of
these corpora, he argues that the ambiguity between the passive and the
impersonal interpretations is resolved contextually by taking into
consideration the properties of the verb and theme as well as
aspectual-temporal information. Finally, Maldonado evaluates the use
of impersonal, passive, and middle se constructions in different types of
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real scenarios: written press, formal oral, informal interviews, and

informal dialogue.
The title of the next chapter, by Neus Nogue-Serrano, is self-
explanatory: “Participant self-reference, under-determination, generali-
sation, vagueness and ambiguity in political discourse: a contrastive
analysis of parliamentary debate and twitter usages”. Relying on Erving
Goffman’s seminal proposal on participation frameworks, as well as
studies of person deixis in Catalan, Nogue-Serrano analyses the
construction of the public image of two politicians (based on texts
produced by themselves, a man and a woman) in two domains of use: the
parliamentary speech (at the Parliament of Catalonia) and Twitter
messages. The position held by each of these two people, together with
the ideology and certain features of the context —especially, the degree of
institutionalization— are the most important factors in the characteri-
zation of self-reference strategies. Individual self-reference is never vague
or ambiguous. On the other hand, under-determination, generality and
ambiguity appear in references that speakers address to the group they
belong to. Communication success is not affected in any case. In
addition, there are no cases of misunderstanding or in which clarification
is needed.
Josep E. Ribera also deals with the subject of parliamentary discourse,
but in this case the author focuses on the parliamentary debate in relation
to referential cohesion, ambiguity, vagueness and generality. This chapter
explains how, despite the fact that political discourse has traditionally
been characterized as vague and ambiguous, with generic and under-
specified words to avoid commitment, these qualifiers cannot be directly
applied to the parliamentary debate. Instead, several aspects characterize
the parliamentary discourse as general with respect to referential
cohesion. The corpus studied consists of two parliamentary debates in
English and Catalan, with a qualitative and quantitative study of several
variables and a final statistical analysis. This analysis shows that there are
clear differences between the languages (independent variable) and the
dependent variables that are taken into account (the type of referential
units, the non-specific or specific referential nature of these units, and the
devices involved in maintaining the continuity of the subject). The results
also show that the dominance of abstract relationships and the lower
presence of concrete references are characteristics of parliamentary
discourse as a genre.
Francesch and Payrat o’s chapter deals with pragmatic ambiguity as a
crosslinguistic and cross-cultural phenomenon, focusing on the transla-
tion of implicatures, presuppositions and indirect speech acts. Drawing
data from a translation corpus containing written fiction, press articles
and TV series, the authors put forward a pragmatic and translational
framework for analysing these ambiguities in target texts and source
texts. The chapter shows that while presuppositions appear to persist in
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translation regardless of the language, utterances carrying implicatures

and indirect speech acts may pose translators with challenges, due to
their dependence on cultural conventions. The data presented is also
aimed at questioning the universality of conversational maxims, and
confirms that, beyond the strictly grammatical competence, translators
need a pragmatic competence to connect structural aspects of source and
target languages with contextual and cultural backgrounds.
Based on two corpora containing Spanish L2 learners’ texts, next
chapter, by Marıa Sampedro, analyzes lexical ambiguity arising from
false cognates in Spanish as a second language. The study also seeks to
find out differences in the way that native speakers interpret Spanish
utterances, depending on whether they know that they are produced by
non-native speakers or not. Indeed, informants who know that
utterances are produced by a non-native speaker are more critical in
their evaluations. In addition, they are more prone to finding lexical
ambiguity in these sentences than listeners who do not have this
information. In the process of evaluating the utterances, the results show
that listeners pay more attention to speaker profiles than to utterances at
the discourse level, even if sentences have no errors. Consequently, the
interlanguage seems to have a more negative perception than the first
language.
In his article, Christian Wurm explains certain previous results and
concepts from ambiguity logics that may be relevant for linguists and
philosophers interested on ambiguity. Firstly, he identifies five properties
of ambiguity that are fundamental from a logical viewpoint: Universal
Distribution, Unambiguous Entailment, Associativity, Idempotence, and
Conservative extension. Secondly, he discusses other properties of
ambiguity that are facultative, to the extent that they do not affect the
linguistic notion of ambiguity although they are relevant to formalize
reasoning with ambiguity: satisfying different facultative properties yields
to different types of ambiguity logics. Thirdly, the author mentions
several prejudices concerning ambiguity that should be eradicated if one
attempts to investigate logical systems with ambiguous propositions.
Wurm then continues presenting the main ingredients of ambiguity
logics: the so-called Fundamental Theorem and several central defini-
tions. The author concludes by emphasizing the necessity of ambiguous
propositions although they do not have the same logical properties as
(prototypical) unambiguous propositions.
Although the articles contained within the volume we present do not
cover all possible approaches to linguistic ambiguity, we believe that they
offer a broad overview that may be helpful for linguistics from different
fields. We hope that they will contribute to the remarkably extensive
research tradition on ambiguity, which has multiple antecedents and
roots, but must still continue developing and deepening into a
phenomenon that seems consubstantial to language use.
Linguistica.
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Received September 14, 2023 Jordi Fortuny and Lluıs Payrat o
Accepted September 28, 2023 Departament de Filologia Catalana i
Ling€uıstica General
Universitat de Barcelona
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585 08007
Barcelona Spain
jordifortuny@ub.edu, payrato@ub.edu
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AMBIGUITY IN LINGUISTICS1

Jordi Fortuny & Lluıs Payrat

Abstract. Ambiguity is conventionally deﬁned in Linguistics as a property of a

Given that ambiguity is pervasive in natural languages utterances

It is also uncontroversial that the content of certain utterances

If a server utters (5) to a co-worker, then she refers “indirectly to the

nonliterally in Spanish. More precisely, they focus on the interpretation

real scenarios: written press, formal oral, informal interviews, and

translation regardless of the language, utterances carrying implicatures

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