A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

458 structural ambiguity
largely dated conception of grammatical analysis, though the emphases which
characterized it may still be seen in several areas of applied linguistic studies
(e.g. in the structural drills of foreign-language teaching), and the term ‘structural’
is often given a special status as part of the exposition of a grammatical
model, e.g. the notion of structural description in transformational
grammar. Structural semantics is an influential contemporary position, which is
still in its early stages of analysing the sense relations that interconnect lexemes
and sentences.
structural ambiguity A term used in linguistics to refer to a construction
with more than one grammatical interpretation in terms of constituent
analysis; also called grammatical ambiguity. A much-used example is old men
and women, which is structurally ambiguous: it may be analysed as [old men]
and women (i.e. only the men are old) or old [men and women] (i.e. both the
men and women are old). In generative grammar, this phenomenon is sometimes
referred to as ‘constructional homonymity’.
structural analysis
see structural description
structural Case see case (2)
structural change (SC) A term used in (especially classical) transformational
grammar to refer to the operations involved in applying a transformational
rule, i.e. the changes between the input and the output phrase-markers. In
the transformation of active into passive sentences, for example, the structural
change is complex, involving the reordering of the two noun phrases,
and the insertion of new forms of the verb, and the agent marker by (e.g.
The dog bit the cat v. The cat was bitten by the dog).
structural description (SD) A term used in (especially classical) transformational
grammar to refer to an analysis of a terminal string in terms of a
labelled bracketing. In transformational analysis, the SD identifies the input to
a transformational rule: it specifies which phrase-markers are to be affected
by the rule, i.e. which will ‘satisfy’ or ‘meet’ the conditions of the rule. The
terms structural analysis and structure index are also used.
structural dialectology
see dialect
structuralism (n.)
see structural
structural semantics
see semantics
structural word
see form word
structure (n.) In its most general sense, and especially as defined by structuralist
studies of human institutions and behaviour, the term applies to the main
abstract characteristic of a semiotic system. A language, for example, is a
structure, in the sense that it is a network of interrelated units, the meaning of
the parts being specifiable only with reference to the whole. In this sense, the