Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 132

7th International Conference on Social Science and Education Research (SSER 2017)

Analysis of Ambiguity
Lihong Wang1, a * and Weijie Gou2,b
1
beijing Polytechnic, Department of English Teaching, Beijing China 100176
2
beijing Polytechnic, School of Automotive Engineering, Beijing China 100176
a
wlhjane@126.coml, bgvjie@126.com,

Keywords: Phonetics; Lexis; Ambiguity

Abstract. Ambiguity in English is a phenomenon, which, for a variety of reasons, is very

complicated. The paper’s intention is to analyze how ambiguity may have its origins in phonetics
and lexis. The ensuing commentary thus contributes towards avoiding possible misunderstanding
caused by ambiguity in communication. Ambiguity is a common phenomenon in natural. It means
that a word, phrase or sentence has at least two distinct meanings. In extremely informational
communication it will cause barriers to understand. Sometimes it will cause divergence or dispute.
So sophistry and argument usually use ambiguity to make tricks. But ambiguity has its advantages.
For example, in poetry or lyrical prose, it can arouse riche imagination or add aesthetic color to the
word. The writer usually uses ambiguity to express complicated emotion, so every reader can have
his or her own understanding instead of only one conclusion puns, riddles and cross talks are the
positive models of using ambiguity. So, in order to understand the language deeply and promote the
efficiency of communication, we should make further discussion about ambiguity.
According to the systematic functional grammar, language has 3 dimensions: phonology, syntax and
semantics. So we will discuss the language ambiguity from these three dimensions.

Phonological Ambiguity
In oral communication, the speech sound is the carrier of information. It is a psychological process
of encoding and decoding. If there is no literal help and context, the polysemy, homonymy, liaison
and omission are easier to cause ambiguity. The following examples are part of this kind of
ambiguity.
A. “How is bread made?”
B. “I know that!” Alice cried eagerly, “You take some flour.”
A. “Where do you picked the flower?” the White Queen asked, “In a garden, or in the
hedges?”
B. “Well, it isn’t picked at all.” Alice explained, “it’s ground……”
A. “How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen.
During this conversation, the ambiguity is due to the two sets of homonyms: flower and flour
and the meanings of ground.

Semantic Ambiguity
It is also called lexical ambiguity. There are mainly three types of lexical ambiguity: polysemy,
homonymy and categorical ambiguity. Polysemous words are whose several meaning are related to
one another. For example, the verb “open” has many senses concerning unfolding, expanding,
revealing, moving to an open position, making openings and so on. Conversely, homonymous
words have meanings with no relationship one to another. For example, “bark” means both the
noise a dog makes and the stuff on the outside of a tree. A word may be both polysemous and
homonymous; the adjective “right” has several senses concerning correctness and righteousness, but
also senses concerning the right-hand side. There is no clear line between polysemy and homonymy.
Categorically ambiguous words are those whose syntactic category may vary. For example, “sink”

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 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 132

can be a noun describing a plumbing fixture or a verb meaning become submerged. It usually
interacts with other types of ambiguity.
Besides the above mentioned three types, we should discuss the lexical ambiguity due to the
cultural differences. Language is part of culture. Its existence and development interact with the
culture, so the different cultural backgrounds often make misunderstanding and ambiguity in
communication. For example, the sentence “You are a lucky dog.” means you are very fortunate. In
English, people like dogs and usually use ‘dog’ to signify the human being. But, in Chinese, the dog
is a derogatory term. Sometimes, literally, the correspondent translation means one. But, in fact real
meaning is completely different from the literal. For example, the “mad doctor” means the
“psychiatrist” instead of a doctor who is mad. The “confidence man” means the “fraudulent person”
instead of the man who has confidence. So learning a foreign language is not a matter of simple
word-for-word translation. At the same time, The semantic ambiguity due to culture differences is
very important for a translator.

Syntactic ambiguity
It is also called grammatical ambiguity or structural ambiguity. The difference in meaning is due to
the different structures which are permitted by the rules of syntax. Different grammatical
combinations have different functional potentials, so one surface structure may have more than one
deep structure.
The first class of syntactic ambiguity is that of Attachment Ambiguity: there being more than one
node to which a particular syntactic constituent may legally be attached. Attachment problems are
mostly problems of modifier placement. The most common example is that of a prepositional
phrase. For example, “he hit the man with a stick”. Below I list some of the other occasions on
which Attachment Ambiguity may occur.
1) A prepositional phrase may have more than one verb phrase available to attach to. For
example, the student will discuss their plan to hold a party in the classroom. Here, the phrase
‘in the classroom’ can attach to the verb phrase ‘discuss their plan’ or verb phase ‘hold a party’.
2) When a sentence contains a subsentence, both may contain places for the attachment
of a prepositional or a adverb. For example, “Rose said that Nancy had taken the cleaning out
yesterday.” The word “yesterday” may quality the saying action of the matrix sentence, or the
taking action of the subsentence.
3) An Attachment Ambiguity also occurs when an adverbial may modify the sentence
verb or the whole sentence: “Happily, Nancy cleaned up the mass Rose had left.” The adverb
‘happily’ would be attached to the sentence, meaning that the event was a fortunate occurrence,
or it would be attached to the verb phrase, meaning that Nancy was happy to clean up the mess.
The second class of ambiguity is Gap-finding ambiguity. It occurs when a move constituent has
be returned to its pretransformational starting point, and there is more than one place that it might
go. For example, “there are the boys that the police debated about fighting.” In this sentence, there
are two possible gaps in the relative clause. Taking the first gap gives the meaning that the police
debated with the boys on the topic of fighting, the second give the police debated among themselves
about fighting the boys. In a few cases, a past participle can look like a gapped verb phrase,
rendering a question indistinguishable, but for punctuation or intonation from a command. For
example, “have the crystals dissolved?” (Question) “have the crystals dissolved.” (Imperative)
The third king of ambiguity is the Analytical Ambiguity. It occurs when the nature of the
constituent is itself in doubt, that is, when there is more than one possible analysis of it. For
example, “ revolving doors can be dangerous.” Here the word ‘revolving’ can be an adjective or a
present participle. Participles and adjectives can be particularly troublesome when they occur at the
end of a clause. For example, “The manager approached the boy smoking a cigar.” The participle
‘smoking a cigar’ can be as a reduced restrictive clause or as a verb complement. This sentence can
mean that the man, smoking a cigar, approached the boy or the boy smoking a cigar was approached
by the manager. On the other hand, the noun groups can have a complex internal structure. It is
difficult to determine the structure of a complex noun group, including modifier scope. For example,

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“long hair and beards.” It means either long hair and long beards or beard and long hair. In the
phrase of more realistic novels, the word ‘more’ can either modify the adjective ‘realistic’ or the
noun phrase of ‘realistic novels’.
At last we should discuss the interaction between categorical and syntactic ambiguity. If a word
is categorically ambiguous, a sentence containing it can be structurally is categorically ambiguous
and the possibilities will correspond to those for words. For example, “The Japanese push bottles up
the Chinese.” In this sentence, the word “push” and “bottle” could be verb and noun respectively, or
noun and verb. Certainly, not all categorical ambiguity result in syntactic ambiguity, since the
syntactic context will often admit one of the alternatives.
From all the above discussions, it should be realized that the meaning of a sentence depends to a
great extent on the meaning of the words of which it is composed. But the structure of the sentence
also contributes to its meaning. Phonological analysis, semantic interpretation and syntactic analysis
must be completely integrated. Especially the syntactic and semantic processing of text should
proceed at the sane time. Though the occurrence of ambiguity is very common, it is not a big
problem in communication. Sometimes the supra-segments, such as stress, intonation could
disambiguate the sentence in spoken language, as may the insertion of punctuation in the written
from. On the other hand, mostly conditional contexts can help to unambiguous sentences. For
example, “she can not bear children may mean she is unable to give birth to children or she can not
tolerate children. It will be unambiguous if the sentences are like: “She can not bear children if they
are noisy,” or “she can not bear children because she is sterile.” The deep research on ambiguity
will contribute to reveal the inherent law of language and have fare-reaching significance to the
linguistic theory. At the same time, it helps us to promote our communicative ability.

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