Ambiguty

Ambiguity

                        Although people are sometimes said to be ambiguous in how they use language, ambiguity is, strictly speaking, a property of linguistic expressions. Ambiguity may occur in words, phrases, or sentences. Those can be said to be ambiguous if they have two or more distinct meanings. Soedjatmiko (1988: 26) defines ambiguity as a linguistic condition which can arise in a variety of ways.  According to Bach (1994: 124) there are two types of ambiguity: lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity.

Lexical Ambiguity

Lexical ambiguity is by far more common. Everyday example is the word “Time”. This term can be a noun, a verb, and an adjective. In sentence “Time is money”, the word “time” is a noun while “time” in “Time me on the last lap” is a verb, and in the sentence “Time travel is not likely in my life time”, the word “time” is an adjective.

Another example is the words “desert” and “dessert” which function as a verb and a noun respectively. As a verb or a noun, the words are pronounced the same but spelled differently.

The other lexical ambiguity is a word ambiguity such as the word “bank” Kempson (1977: 80) stated the word “bank” has two different concepts of meanings, one describing a side of a river, the other describing the financial institution.

Structural Ambiguity

Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan history teacher', 'a student of high moral principles' and 'short men and women', and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting relatives can be boring'. These ambiguities are said to be structural because each such phrase can be represented in two structurally different ways, e.g., '(Tibetan history) teacher' and 'Tibetan (history teacher)’. The following sentence “Put the box on the table by the window in the kitchen” has more than one underlying structure. The first underlying structure can be “Put the box (a specific box - the one on the table by the window) in the kitchen” and the second can be “Put the box on the table (a specific table - by the window in the kitchen)”

Bach (1994: 124) states that it is not always clear when a case is of structural ambiguity, such as the elliptical sentence; in “Peter worked hard and passed the exam. Kevin too" The elliptical sentence “Kevin too” has three interpretations: Kevin worked hard, Kevin passed the exam, and Kevin did both. The other example is 'Perot knows a richer man than Trump'. It has two meanings that Perot knows a man who is richer than Trump and that Perot knows a man who is richer than any man Trump knows. Therefore the sentence “Perot knows a rich man than Trump” is ambiguous.

The theory of ambiguity is used to analyze humor since this theory related to humor as stated by Dave Inman (1997) that humor depends on ambiguity, it seems that we are lead down the "garden path" to one meaning, and at the end find we were wrong all along. We seem to like to be surprised sometimes.