So let’s talk about ambiguity. When we try to communicate, we usually have one specific
point we're trying to get across, clean and clear. But unfortunately, language isn't like
that. It's messy and it knocks things over, and a lot of the time, it actually ends up
picking up a whole bunch of meanings at once. But just because we scatter meanings all over
the cosmos doesn’t mean the way we say many things at once is random. I’m Moti Lieberman,
and this is the Ling Space.
It’s hard to talk about language without starting to notice all the ways ambiguity
seeps into our conversations. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve discussed it a
few times before. Like, there’s semantic scope ambiguity, in sentences like “Every
cousin pushed around a ball.” That could mean all the cousins pushed around the
same giant ball, or it could be they all pushed around separate balls, and the sentence could still be true.
Or, there’s garden path sentences, which can confuse us because they temporarily seem
like they go with one meaning, only to end up somewhere else. “The prince found all
the swans” is actually ambiguous – it could be the end of the sentence, or it could
keep going with something like, “to be very elegant”. So the swans could be the object
of the finding, or they could be the subject of the embedded clause, and there’s no way
to know unless you get more info.
And even just last episode, we talked about word structure ambiguities, or the way
a word can mean different things depending on the order you put its component morphemes
together. A word like “unrollable” could mean something that can be unrolled – so,
unroll-able – or something that can’t be rolled – so, un-rollable.
So today, we’re going to discuss a few more ambiguities we can find out there. But not
just that – there must be some cost to dealing with all these meanings getting stuck together,
right? How do we learn to deal with this big ball of interpretations, and what do we do
with them all?
Before we dive into that, let’s take a look at some more varieties of ambiguity. One type
we haven’t touched on yet, which is actually a huge source of puns, is polysemy or lexical
ambiguity, which is when the same string of sounds has more than one meaning. Now, sometimes,
these meanings can be totally, 100% unrelated – just a fluke of linguistic history.
Like, think of a word like “bowl”. Now, this could be a thing you eat soup out of, but
it could also be a game with pins. These two senses of “bowl” are just homonyms – they’re written and
pronounced the same way, but there’s no deeper link. And a lot of words are still
ambiguous, even if they’re spelled differently – “blue” and “blew”, “roll”
and “role”, “aunt” and “ant”, and more. These are known as homophones, because
they sound alike even if they’re written differently.
Of course, this sort of polysemy isn’t limited to English. So, in French, [sã] can mean
hundred, without, or blood, among others. Or in Japanese, [ha] could be tooth, leaf, or
blade. If you think about your languages, you probably won’t have to try hard to start
coming up with your own examples.
But often, there are links between the meanings that the different words are attached to.
So like, for “book”, the first meaning you might think of is, like, a tome with pages
and writing and all that. But you could also make a reservation or sign a contract, like
booking a table at a restaurant. The thing is, that’s from someone writing down the
information in a book somewhere. It’s connected. And some of the most popular English strings
of sounds, like “run” or “set”, can have hundreds of different meanings.
But do these distinctions about how related the forms actually are matter?
Well, in 2002, some psycholinguists wanted to look into this, and they performed a series
of lexical decision tasks, where participants were presented with strings of letters and
had to decide as fast as they could whether or not what they were looking at was a word.
The researchers included ambiguous words with unrelated meanings, so homonyms like “punch”
or “bowl”, and words with linked meanings, like “book” or “eye”.
And what they found was that connectedness matters. Polysemous words, with their line
of meanings that run along the same abstract theme, are faster to recognize as words. On
the other hand, homonyms, with their diverse underlying senses, seem to compete with each
other. That clash slows down recognizing those strings as words. So whether ambiguous words
have linked meanings or not creates a difference in how easy it is for us to pick out words
from our mental dictionaries.
Another effect of polysemous words is that depending on which interpretation you pick,
the structure for the whole sentence may change. Take something like “The
astronaut drank the smoothie with lots of zest.” Now, this could mean that he did
the drinking with a lot of gusto, in which case “lots of zest” would be telling you
about the verb, “drank”. But it also could be that his delicious smoothie has a ton
of grated orange peel, which is also known as “zest”. In that case, “lots of zest”
is telling you about the drink itself; maybe the astronaut hated all the zest, but he just drank it anyway.
And that’s a larger problem with syntactic ambiguities – we can tree up our sentence
in multiple ways, to give us multiple meanings, but there’s no specific reason within the
syntax itself to tell you which is better. That zesty sentence we just saw? That’s
a prepositional phrase, or PP, ambiguity, and they’re ridiculously common. You don’t
need the words in the PP to be particularly polysemous, either.
Take “the prince found the cousin with the metal detector”. This has the same types
of interpretations as before: either the cousin has the metal detector, and the PP attaches
to “cousin”, or the prince found them with the metal detector, and the PP attaches
to “found”. The system itself can’t tell you what’s really meant; there’s
no way to tell them apart.
And that isn’t the only kind of syntactic ambiguity, not by a long shot. Let’s consider
a sentence like “Marcy met the niece of the queen who liked polka dots.” Now, who
likes spotted designs here? Well, it depends where you put the relative clause. You could
attach it to “queen”, like this, and then you’d have a queen who’s a polka-dot fan.
Or you could attach it to “niece,” like this, and now it’s the younger one who’s
into the dots. And again, there’s nothing specific to the syntax that can tell you which
of these is better.
Which is a problem. Whoever put that ambiguous sentence out into the world, they
probably only meant one of the available meanings. So if we want to understand them, we have
to do something! Luckily, we have lots of tools for working these things out. And the biggest
of these is just looking at the meaning of everything else in the sentence.
So let’s say a sentence starts, “Johnson read the label of the bottle that…” Now,
if the continuation is “was written in Czech”, then that’s probably the label, because bottles
aren’t usually written. But if instead, the sentence finishes “was filled with melon
soda”, well, that’s probably the bottle. And even much smaller semantic nudges one way
or the other can influence what interpretation we come up with.
But if pragmatics isn’t enough to decide, we still have other tools to fall back on.
The prosody of how people pronounce sentences, the length of a given phrase, even the relative
size of the different pieces you’re combining, all of these have been shown to influence
interpretations. And beyond any given string of words, we also have parsing preferences
about how we approach sentences, even ones we’re not sure about.
Because we interpret sentences as we encounter the words coming our way, we prefer to check
what any given word needs, and try to satisfy its wordly desires as we go along. That’s
why our brains tend to stop after a string like “the prince found all the swans”,
even if it could continue with “to be very elegant”. “Found” needs something
that finds, and something to be found; once we have those, we try to stop there and not complicate things.
How do we even learn these strategies, though? I mean, ambiguity is super everywhere - it’s
in everything from our morphology to our syntax and semantics. How do kids deal with all of
this? Well… the answer is that, for the most part,
they don’t. I mean, you can get young kids to notice there are ambiguities sometimes,
like with semantic scope; we’ll put a link down in the description to something we wrote about
that before. But for the most part, kids don’t have the processing power to deal with any
sort of ambiguity.
So for example, kids under 4 don’t generally seem to get the whole homonym thing well,
like that a flying bat and a baseball bat are both pronounced the same way. And that
means that they have a hard time noticing that a sentence like “The boys saw a bat
in the park” is ambiguous. They take their preferred reading, and they carry it home with them.
Of course, it’s also noted that many kids around this age suddenly fall in love with
puns once they start noticing these ambiguities; this predilection, and also picking up ambiguities
like these, seems to go along with kids’ reading ability.
But once you get beyond words themselves, picking out syntactic ambiguities can be even
harder. Like, kids, even through early elementary school, will struggle with telling that sentences
like “The king talked to the prince with the walkie-talkie” are ambiguous.
Even if the interpretation they come up with is weird, they have a hard time getting a
more realistic reading - like, when a kid hears “Chop the tree with the leaves”,
if they start out thinking the leaves are doing the chopping, they’re not like, “huh,
well, that’s weird. Can you even chop things using leaves? Maybe it’s saying what tree
to chop?” They just run with the weirdness.
The thinking here is that kids have a really hard time moving off interpretations once
they’ve latched on to them. It actually takes a lot of cognitive energy to roll back
over what you came up with, see that it’s weird, and then reprocess the sentence. That
implies that it’s not the ability to come up with both structures that’s missing. They just
don’t have the brain control to fix things they processed wrong, until they’re 8 or
so. Kids may be really good at language things, but they just can’t roll with all that ambiguity.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you understood all my meanings,
you learned that language shows ambiguity in pretty much all of its systems;
that a word with multiple meanings can actually be easier or harder to interpret, depending
on what those meanings are; that our sentences are filled with syntax that’s impossible
to resolve, even though we try our best; and that kids aren’t super great at handling
ambiguity in their linguistic worlds.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
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And we’ll see you in two weeks. Tau toki sio!