Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
We will distinguish three kinds of syntactic ambiguity: (i) Distributional,
(ii) Constructional, and (iii) Transformational.
4.1. Distributional ambiguity occurs when one or more of the constituents of a
structure may have more than one function, i.e. when the distribution of such
constituents is multiple. Thus, the sentence
(8) They can fish.
is two-ways ambiguous in that can may be either an ‘auxiliary’ or a transitive
verb. Additionally, fish can serve as an intransitive verb or as a noun. It is worth
noting that we have no structural way of proving the difference in the distributional
classification. Clearly, what renders the sentence ambiguous is the collocation
of these two items in this particular context; note also that
(8a) (i) They can sleep.
(ii) They may fish.
(iii) They can salmon.
are quite unambiguous utterances. Resolving this type of ambiguity is generally
no difficult affair and can be done by adding, deleting, substituting, permuting an
element in the original sentence. Where applicable, the passive transformation is
a good way of disambiguating sentences and sentence-parts, as is shown below:
(8b) (i) They can fish.
(ii) Fish is canned (by them).
However, certain ambiguities survive passivisation.
Occasionally, different distributional classification of a form may produce
a comic effect. In the following dialogue in an early episode from the MUPPET
SHOW two quite old men were talking about an attractive lady singer on stage:
(9) A: You know, she makes me feel like a young boy.
B: She makes me feel like a young girl.
In the first exchange, ‘like’ is a preposition (and is structured together with ‘a
young boy’), while in the second, ‘like’ is an adverbial particle (and collocates
with ‘feel’ in the phrasal verb ‘feel like’).
At this point it would be interesting to remember that perceiving a humorous
expression is a characteristic of native speakers of a language.
4.1.1. One fairly common and quite frequent, systematic and interesting instance
of distributional ambiguity, the phenomenon of anaphora, deserves special men-
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