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Stathis Efstathiadis: SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY REVISITED
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The ambiguous sentences below receive similar analyses:
(28) Ethel is less interested in the job than Bob.
(29) I have met more intelligent students than Bill.
(30) I like Virtue better than Faith. 13
5. Overlapping types of ambiguity
Most often, ambiguity is a combined function of polysemous lexical items in
potentially ambiguous (i.e. transformationally derived) structural frames. 1413 Here
is a pertinent example:
(31) Smoking grass is sickening.
which is four-ways ambiguous, lexically (extended meaning of ‘grass’) and also
transformationally
(31a) (i) Grass (the low-growing, green plant) that gives out fumes is
sickening.
(ii) To smoke grass (the low-growing, green plant) is sickening.
(iii) Marihuana that gives out fumes is sickening.
(iv) To smoke marihuana is sickening.
5.1. In the sentence
(32) I hate her singing.
singing can be either a lexical item (= song) or it can be transformationally derived
(= the fact that she sings / the way she sings / while she sings); additional
ambiguity is introduced by her functioning as direct object to hate: note that ‘I
hate him singing’ is (normally) not ambiguous, and ‘I hate his singing’ is not
ambiguous in the same way.
5.2. Ambiguity in the sentence
(33) The storm blew down the chimney.
stems from the different bracketing that down may receive: either [blew down], a
phrasal verb with a meaning distinct from that of its component parts; or [down
13 This sentence is at least four-ways ambiguous, owing to the possibility of Virtue and Faith being
taken as abstract nouns and also as feminine names.
14 As has already been stated, such representations are ‘intermediate’ in that they are not ‘deep’ and
they are not ‘surface’ either: they are derived after application of one or more singulary or generalised
transformations and before lexical insertions etc. rules apply to produce sentences.
Notice, however, that grammatical transformations leave lexical content unaffected.