Loosely speaking, the following sentences are all ambiguous because they contain words that can be interpreted in different ways:

When you read (1), you will presumably think of identification papers like a passport or visa, but if the speaker then said …so she had to read the news on her phone instead, you would realize that papers refers to newspapers. When you read (2), you may think of a financial institution and expect that Aylin intends to deposit her savings, but if the speaker then continued … where she buried them under a tree near the water, you would realize that bank refers to the bank of a river. When you read (3), you may not notice an ambiguity, but if the speaker continued …Aylin will visit him there next summer, you will realize that the cousin is male, and if the speaker continued Aylin will visit her there next summer, you will realize that the cousin is female. In (4), you may also not notice any ambiguity at first, but depending on whether the speaker continued …she ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon or …a glass of craft beer, you would interpret the word expensive in two very different ways (a very expensive glass of craft beer might cost you 20 Euros, a very cheap bottle of Dom Perignon will cost you at least 250 Euros).

If we interpret the notion of ambiguity a little more strictly, we might see a general difference between the first two sentences (which each have two completely different interpretations) on the one hand, and the last two sentences (which have different, but closely related interpretations) on the other: The words papers and bank each have two distinct senses, while cousin and expensive each only have one sense that can be interpreted in different ways depending on context. The word cousin always means ‘child of one’s uncle and/or aunt’ — like the word child, it can be applied to people of any sex (unlike other kinship terms like mother/father, brother/sister or aunt/uncle): it is indeterminate with respect to this semantic component. The word expensive always means ‘costing a lot of money’ — what we consider ‘a lot’ depends on what the average amount is — 20 Euros is a lot for a glass of beer, because the average price of a glass of beer is somewhere between 5 and 10 Euros. It is not a lot for a bottle of Champagne, whose average price is closer to 100 Euros, so we would call a 20 euro bottle of Champagne cheap. In other words, the meaning of expensive is vague until we apply it to a particular domain.

Let us first look at the broad difference between ambiguity, indeterminacy and vagueness, and then return to look more closely at ambiguity.

Distinguishing ambiguity from vagueness and indeterminacy

As we saw above, the English word papers can refer to different things, which might be referred to by different words in other languages (e.g. Papiere and Zeitungen in German, papiers and journeaux in French, evraklar and gazeteler in Turkish, etc.). How do we figure out whether papers has multiple senses (i.e. is ambiguous), or whether it has a single sense that is vague or indeterminate?

There are some linguistic tests which can help us to make this decision.

The most common test is based on the principle that distinct senses of an ambiguous word are antagonistic, which means that they cannot both apply simultaneously. It seems that Aylin lost her papers can mean either that she lost her passport and visa or that she lost her newspapers. If we were to use it in both senses in a single sentence, the result would feel like a pun:

The odd nature of sentences like this provides evidence that two distinct senses are involved: If we construct parallel sentences with words like cousin and expensive, we do not get this effect — the sentences are perfectly normal:

This is true even though the different interpretations may require distinct words in other languages (e.g. Cousin and Cousine in German).

A second test which is sometimes useful is the sense relations test: distinct senses will have different sets of synonyms, antonyms, etc. (see discussion of sense relations in the next section). For example, the word papers in the first sense has the synonyms documentation, passport, ID, etc., in the second sense, it has the synonyms newspaper, daily, gazette etc. The word expensive, in contrast, has the synonyms costly and pricey and the antonym cheap whatever the context. This test does not always work, of course, as there are words that have no synonyms or antonyms (like cousin).

A third test for distinct senses is provided by the test of contradiction. If a sentence of the form X but not X can be true, then expression X must be ambiguous. For example, we could say (with stress on both occurrences of the word papers):

In contrast, we cannot say:

This is an excellent test in principle, but in many cases, it will be difficult to find contexts in which such sentences sound truly natural, so it depends on the imagination of the researcher to a certain extent.

Polysemy and homonymy

We distinguish two types of lexical ambiguity: polysemy (one word with multiple senses) vs. homonymy (different words that happen to sound the same). Both cases involve a word form with two different senses; the difference lies in the relationship between the senses.

The basic criterion for making this distinction is that in cases of polysemy, the two senses are felt to be “related” in some way — that fluent speakers can see why the two senses might be connected to the same form —, while in cases of homonymy, the two senses are felt to be unrelated; that is, the semantic relationship between the two senses just as different as that between any two words selected at random.

For the two senses of papers, one can see a relation: both of them have referents that are (or used to be) printed on paper. Note that the fact that this is (or may soon be) no longer the case — newspapers are increasingly moving online and abandoning their printed editions, and the same is true for ID documents —, means that such relations can get lost over time, so a polysemous word can change into a pair of homonymous words. For example, when the word sentence was borrowed into English from Norman French in the 13th century, it had two related (sets of) meanings: first, ‘opinion, view, interpretation’, and second, ‘authoritative pronouncement (by God, the church, a court etc,)’. The two are related, because a pronouncement by an authority is based on the opinion of that authority. In fact, the word opinion itself still has this polysemy, when we talk about judges at an US appellate court or the US supreme court presenting a dissenting opinion on some judgment. Over time, the first meaning shifted from the content to the form in which the opinion was expressed, and finally to the modern sense ‘1. a sequence of words forming a grammatically complete expression’ as in Use whole sentences, please. The second meaning shifted from the pronouncement of a court’s decision to the content of that decision — ‘2. the punishment assigned to a person found guilty’, as in life sentence, prison sentence, death sentence, etc. These two senses are no longer felt to be related, so we would treat the words sentence1 and sentence2 as homonyms.

It is difficult to draw a clear boundary between these two types of ambiguity, and some authors reject the distinction entirely. However, many ambiguous words clearly belong to one type or the other, and the distinction is a useful one.

Consider the following differences between clear cases of polysemy and clear cases of homonymy:

• Two senses of a polysemous word generally share at least one salient feature or component of meaning, whereas this is not in general true for homonyms. For example, the sense of foot that denotes a unit of length (‘12 inches’) shares with the body-part sense the same approximate size. The sense of foot that means ‘base’ (as in foot of a tree/mountain) shares with the body-part sense the same position or location relative to the object of which it is a part. These common features suggest that foot is polysemous. In contrast, the two senses of row (‘pull the oars’ vs. ‘things arranged in a line’) seem to have nothing in common, suggesting that row is homonymous.
• If one sense seems to be a figurative extension of the other, the word is probably polysemous. For example, the sense of run in This road runs from Rangoon to Mandalay is arguably based on a metonymy between the act of running and the path traversed by the runner, suggesting that this is a case of polysemy.
• For polysemous words, one sense can often be identified as the primary sense, with other senses being classified as secondary or figurative. The primary sense will typically be the one most likely to be chosen if you ask a native speaker to illustrate how the word X is used in a sentence, or if you ask a bilingual speaker what the word X means (i.e., ask for a translation equivalent). For homonymous words, neither sense is likely to be “primary” in this way.

Some linguists distinguish between systematic and non-systematic polysemy. Systematic polysemy involves senses which are related in recurring or predictable ways. For example, many verbs which denote a change of state (break, melt, split, etc.) have two senses, one describing a change that occurs without an external cause (The window broke, The ice melted, The tree split) and one describing a change that is caused externally (Johnny broke the window, Zoe melted the ice, Lightning split the tree). Similarly, many nouns that refer to things used as instruments (hammer, saw, paddle, whip, brush, comb, rake, shovel, plow, sandpaper, anchor, tape, chain, telephone, etc.) can also be used as verbs meaning roughly ‘to use the instrument to act on an appropriate object.’

The kinds of regularities involved in systematic polysemy are similar to patterns which are associated with derivational morphology in some languages — note that the examples just given would be described as conversion (see Section 5.6). Some linguists have even suggested that for such cases of systematic polysemy, only one sense needs to be included in the lexicon, because the others can be derived by word-formation rules. But in fact, secondary senses need to be listed unless the word-formation rule is fully productive. In the examples given above, the rules would not be fully productive. For example, there are no uses with an external cause for change-of-state verbs like deteriorate, bloom, die and others. Likewise, there are no verbal uses for instrumental nouns like scalpel, yardstick, hatchet, pliers, tweezers, etc.

 

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CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, Introductory paragraph by Anatol Stefanowitsch, remainder of the section adapted from Pau Kroeger, Analyzing Semantics, shortened and restructured by Anatol Stefanowitsch.