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Stathis Efstathiadis: SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY REVISITED
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(6) (i) I felt an ass. 7
(ii) Joe is a man of letters; he works in the Post Office.
(iii) A sign on the lawn at a drug rehabilitation centre said:
“Keep off the grass”.
In (iii) it is the way the polysemous item “grass” is interpreted that causes
ambiguity: grass = the low-growing, green plant, but also grass = marijuana.
Clearly, it is the semantic import and the combinatorial possibilities of the
lexical items chosen for use each time that define the significant phenomenon of
collocationa(bi)lity, demonstrated in phrases like: 87
(7) blue sea, strong coffee; do one’s duty, do wrong; but make trouble, make
a noise, make an excuse; high probability, good chance but *high chance; perform
an operation, have/hold a discussion but *perform a discussion, etc.
4. Syntactic ambiguity
At the syntactic level, ambiguity is observed when a sentence or part of a sentence
is analysable, at some non-superficial level, in more than one way, i.e. when
a sentence or sentence-part can be shown to be derivable from more than one
deep structure.
This implies that deep structures are never ambiguous in themselves, and
that it is only structural transforms before the application of the lexical insertion
rules that may exhibit this property; once such (lexical) rules have applied, whether
the resulting strings will be ambiguous will depend on the collocationa(bi)lity
of the ‘words’ involved, i.e. on the compatibility of the semantic content of the
lexical entries 9 chosen for insertion in particular contexts in the structures generated
by the grammar.
Discussion of the phenomenon of (syntactic) ambiguity is justified to the
extent that it is essential in indicating that both a deep and a surface layer of structure
must be recognised in the process of evaluating grammars.
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Notice that ‘I felt an ass’ is three-ways ambiguous because of the collocation in it of homonymous
ass and the polysemous FEEL.
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Here is another interesting instance of this phenomenon:
Patient: Doctor, have you got something for my liver?
Doctor: How about some onions?
where it is the collocation of ‘liver and onions’, so typical of the British culture, that produces the
particular effect.
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Lexical entries are specified by semantic markers, by distinguishers and by selection restrictions.
Semantic markers may be shared with other lexical items, Distinguishers define the idiosyncratic
characteristics of individual items, and Selection restrictions determine word collocationa(bi)lity.
(cf. Katz 1964; Katz and Postal 1964; Katz and Fodor 1964).