Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 19
shows the distinctions to be made.
Ambiguity? No =) Monosemy
+ Yes
Related senses? No =) Homonymy
+ Yes, Polysemy
Rule? Yes =) Regular, one lexeme (Cruse)
+ No
Two lexemes (Cruse)/ Idiosyncratic Polysemy (Cognitivists)
Table 1.1: Decision Tree for Structure of a Lexical Item
The rst distinction is between ambiguity and generality. If wehave ambiguity,
we must decide what the sources of ambiguity inagiven sentence are. Ambiguity can be
pragmatic, e.g. Why don't you talk about it? can be a true question, a polite suggestion,
or command, depending on the extra-linguistic context; this would be of interest mainly to
sociolinguists, not to lexical semanticists. Distinguishing syntactic and lexical ambiguity is
sometimes easy; consider the following:
(5) a. He learned about the problem in the prison.
b. We all like squash.
c. They saw her duck.
In Ex. (5-a), the ambiguity is purely syntactic, having to do with where the PP
is attached, i.e. whether the problem is in the prison and the learning might have taken
place elsewhere, or the learning took place in the prison and the problem might have taken
place elsewhere. None of the ambiguity is due to the semantics of the words. Conversely, in
Ex. (5-b), there is no syntactic ambiguity, onlysemantic ambiguity associated with squash.
But very often lexical and syntactic ambiguity interact, so that one reading of a word ts
with one syntactic pattern and another with another, as in the standard example Ex. (5-c),
where the syntax and semantics of both her and duck are involved. This kind of interaction
is the basis of many of standard tests for ambiguity.
The rst question is whether a particular word form is ambiguous in a particular
context; if there is only one possible interpretation of a sentence, given all the possibilities
of each lexical form, then the lexical forms in it must be monosemous. This does not mean
that it must refer to a very restricted domain. In the sentence All vertebrates have central