Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

Stathis Efstathiadis: SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY REVISITED
tremely interesting though instances of its phonological and lexical counterparts
may be, they can only be given scanty attention here. (For a detailed treatment of
phonological and lexical ambiguity, see Efstathiadis 1978).
2. Phonological ambiguity
At the phonological level ambiguity is observed whenever quite distinct underlying
phonological matrices are identically realised at the phonetic level (i.e. are
homophonous). The homophonous items in (1a-b) are indicative of this claim.
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(1) (a) night knight
(b) brake break (n. & v.)
Notice that whether such pairs3 of words or phrases belong to the same
grammatical category or not is immaterial and inconsequential to what is being
discussed here.
It is worth noting that phonologically ambiguous entities can survive (linguistic)
context:
(2) (i) The night was still young.
(ii) The knight was still young.
(iii) Atheism is a non-profit organisation.
(iv) Atheism is a non-prophet organisation.
Potentially ambiguous homophonous items functionally utilised may result
in punning (i.e. play on sound or on sequences of sounds) 4 , as is shown by
the example below:
(3) Chemistry teacher: What do you know about nitrates, John?
John: Well, sir, they’re a lot cheaper than day rates, aren’t they?
where the humorous effect is caused by the single phonetic realisation [naitreits]
of the distinct underlying nitrates and night rates.
Phonological ambiguity can also be produced and resolved by intonational
features, stress-placement, pauses, etc. In
(4) It’s money that I need.
the stress either on ‘money’ or on ‘need’ gives the sentence its specific meaning
and ambiguous flair.
3 There are additionally homophonous triplets, etc.: sent – cent – scent; right – rite – write - wright.
4 While on the question of punning, we should stress the linguistically significant and empirically
verified observation that interpreting puns is a competence skill, which is typical of native speakers
of a language, whereas using puns is a performance skill, which not all natives have or have
developed to the same degree.