Lexical meaning - ambiguity, vagueness, indeterminacy

Question 1

3 ways in which meaning of words may be difficult to determine

Answer 1

Distinction between
AMBIGUITY,
INDETERMINACY/generality and
VAGUENESS

Question 2

Lexical ambiguity

Answer 2

> 1 word used to refer to more than one thing
difficult to specify word’s relation to world/relation to other expressions IF meaning not clarified

EG Duffy discovered a mole.
A. Duffy discovered a small burrowing animal.
B. Duffy discovered a long dormant spy. (Saeed, J. 1997:61)
C. Duffy discovered a small raised blemish on his skin.

Question 3

Indeterminacy/generality:

Answer 3

a word can have ‘variable’ reference but a single
sense
• See Kroeger’s (2018, Ch. 5) examples of kinship terms
• COUSIN is indeterminate as it refers to either the male or female offspring of
a parent’s sibling
• French: cousin vs cousine
• UNCLE is indeterminate as to whether it is a mother’s or a father’s brother or
the husband of a parent’s sibling
• Mandarin distinguishes ‘father’s elder brother’ (bóbo), ‘father’s younger
brother’ (shushu),, ‘father’s sister’s husband’ (guzhàng), ‘mother’s
brother’ (jiùjiu), ‘mother’s sister’s husband’ (yízhàng) (Koroeger, 2018:83)

DIFF LANGS LEXICALISE VARIOUS DISTINCTIONS

Question 4

lexical • Vagueness

Answer 4

a property of words that describe phenomena on a continuum
• Tall, bald, red vs orange

> vague terms also often RELATIVE
• Tall baby vs tall basketball player

Vagueness = lack of clear borderlines for the denotation
of terms
• When does something cease to be tall/red/bald?
• Problem for logic & truth conditional theories of meaning
• Difficult to decide exactly when the term ceases to be true of an
object
• Problem of ‘borderline cases’

Question 5

• Ambiguous words cannot apply in their different senses
simultaneously
• They are antagonistic (Cruse, 1986:61)
• Thus they are sources of puns

IDENTITY TEST
CONTRADICTION TEST

Answer 5

It was a terrible summer for humpty dumpty, but he had a great fall
since they are ANTAGONISTIC, they clash in coordinate structures:
ZEUGMA
1. Mary and her visa expired on the same day. (Kroeger, 2018:85)
2. He opened his mind and his wallet every time he went out with her

Identity test:
• Ambiguous words need same interpretation in conjoined sentences
>Bob saw her duck.
> Bob saw her duck and so did Pete.
• No ‘crossed’ readings 

Contradiction test
• X and/but not X: if T then X is ambiguous
> I’ll lie but I won’t lie.
> But: #He is my cousin but he isn’t my cousin.

Question 6

Ambiguity vs vagueness and indeterminacy

Answer 6

Compare with cases of indeterminacy/generality and vagueness:
• Bill is her cousin and so is Lilly.
• Baby Harry is tall, and so is his Dad.

Question 7

lexical ambiguity: POLYSEMY

Answer 7

polysemic word: has more than one sense
plain: (1) ‘a level area of land’; (2) ‘easy, clear’; (3) ‘undecorated’, ‘not good
looking’

Question 8

lexical ambiguity: HOMONYMY

Answer 8

homonymic words: happen to sound the same but have different meanings:
‘I’, ‘eye’, ‘aye’

Question 9

Ambiguity: polysemy vs homonymy - etymology

Answer 9

figurative use important in semantic change
• A difficult criterion to apply: earlier meaning may no longer be relevant
• Silly (adj):
• Old English gesælig “happy, fortuitous, prosperous” (related to sæl
“happiness”), from Proto-Germanic *sæligas (source also of Old Norse sæll
“happy,” Old Saxon salig, Middle Dutch salich, Old High German salig,
German selig “blessed, happy, blissful,” Gothic sels “good, kindhearted”).

Context normally disambiguates/clarifies meaning
• Not such a problem for speakers (but for computers!)

TRANSLATION: ambiguity often source of errors

Question 10

Some figurative uses of language
Metaphor
Metonymy/Synechdoche

Answer 10

METAPHOR: talking about a thing using another domain
• E.g. ideas as food
• That class gave me food for thought.
• His idea is half-baked.
• Let me chew on this idea for a while

METONYMY/SYNECHDOCHE: substitutes a word of phrase for another, a
part for a whole or vice versa
• The suits had their meeting

Question 11

Lexical sense relations: synonymy

Answer 11

If two propositions entail each other, they are equivalent
• ‘x is taller than y’ and ‘y is shorter that x’
• Another way of expressing this latter relation is to say that the 2
sentences are synonymous

LEXICAL SYNONYMY: Sharing Entailments:

1. buy
2. purchase

TRUE lexical synonymy is rare:
• These women at the back would like to talk to you
• These ladies at the back…
• These chicks at the back…

SAME INFO (reference) but DIFF CONNOTATIONS/SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE
• “I am strong minded; you are obstinate; he is a pig-minded
fool.” (B. Russell)

Question 12

Lexical sense relations: antonymy

complementaries vs gradable/polar antonyms

Answer 12

ANTONYMS ARE OPPOSITES!
• Different types:
• Consider the relation between the members of the following two pairs:
• dead & alive
• tall & short
» Both pairs denote opposite qualities; which adjectives can be modified by
‘neither…nor?’
• *When I found the lost dog, it was neither alive nor dead.
BUT
• Joanne is neither tall nor short.

Dead & Alive - COMPLEMENTARIES: if one is true of an individual the other is not

Tall & Short - GRADABLE ANTONYMS: denote opposite poles on a continuum

• Polar antonyms can be easily used in their comparative forms
regardless of e.g. the size of any two objects

Question 13

Pseudocomparatives

Answer 13

• pseudocomparatives
• Two properties: ‘being big/tall’ vs ‘having a certain size/height’

Overlapping antonyms:
BETTER - both good & bad things (overlapping antonyms)
WORSE - only bad things (true comparative)

EQUIPOLLENT ANTONYMS: not poles on a continuum, but DISTINCT PROPERTIES
EG: Happy and Sad
>They’re both happy, but Jo is happier than Al.
> *They’re both happy, but Al is sadder than Jo.
HAPPY = TRUE COMPARATIVE
» They’re both sad, but Al is sadder than Jo.
» *They’re both sad, but Jo is happier than Al.
SAD = ALSO TRUE COMPARATIVE : if you are sad you can’t have any
degree of happiness

• The tea in both cups is hot, but:
• the tea in the red cup is cooler (*colder) than the tea in the blue cup.
• The tea in both cups is cold, but:
• the tea in the red cup is warmer (*hotter) than the tea in the blue cup.

Warm and Cool: PSEUDOCOMPARITIVES - degrees of temperature

Hot and Cold: EQUIPOLLENT ANTONYMS

Question 14

Paradigmatic relations of opposition: summary

Answer 14

COMPLEMENTARIES : “neither…nor” doesn’t work (cf. ‘dead’ and ‘alive’)
POLAR ANTONYMS: “neither…nor” OK

NEUTRAL TERM: “How X…?” OK (cf. ‘how tall/*short…?’)

OVERLAPPING ANTONYMS: one neutral term, the other describes a more
restricted property
» PSEUDOCOMPARATIVE: Comparative of neutral term
» REAL COMPARATIVE: Comparative of the non-neutral term

EQUIPOLLENT ANTONYMS
> Each member of the pair denotes a distinct property
> Each is a true comparative

Question 15

Neutral term

Answer 15

• What’s the difference between:
• How tall is Joanne?
• How short is Joanne?
»tall is the neutral term

Question 16

Other types of paradigmatic relations: HYPONYMY

Answer 16

hierarchical organisation of lexicon
> poodle, dog, canine, mammal, animal
• if you saw a poodle walking down the street, then you also saw a dog,
a member of the canine family, a mammal, an animal in that street
• ?I saw a mammal walking down the street.

ANIMAL = hyperonym of mammal; mammal = hyperonym of canis;
canis= hyperonym of dog

DOG = hyponym of canis, mammal, animal
• the class of dogs is included in the classes labelled by the words above it
in the tree
• so: Mimi is a poodle entails Mimi is a dog

useful for explanations: a poodle is ‘a kind of’ dog
• This poodle is a dog is TAUTOLOGICALl: the feature ‘dog’ is already included in
the word ‘poodle’
• poodle, terrier and bulldog are CO-HYPONYMS (they are at the same level
in the tree)

Question 17

Meronymy

Answer 17

"the part-of relation"
hand & arm 
hand & fingers
elbow & forearm 
room & house;

• Is the relation transitive, like hyponymy?
> Fingers are parts of the hand.
> The hand is part of the arm.
> ?Fingers are part of the arm.

Attachment to immediate wholes forms a boundary

Question 18

Semantic decomposition: Binary Feature Approach

Answer 18

Words that determine classification can be understood in terms of
features too
• Binary Feature Approach

• Eg. [+/- HUMAN]; [+/- FEMALE]; [+/- ADULT]
> Child [+ HUMAN, - ADULT]
> boy [+ HUMAN, - ADULT, - FEMALE]

1. Woman = [+ HUMAN, +ADULT, +FEMALE]
2. Doe = [+DEER, +ADULT, +FEMALE]
3. Mare = [+HORSE, +ADULT, +FEMALE] etc.

• It seems that we also need words like ‘human’, ‘deer’, ‘horse’ etc.
• Difficult to analyse these further
• We need the type of information found in an encyclopaedia or an
exemplar/prototype
• Also binary features cannot capture verb meanings which are structured