From: epstein@sunc2.cs.uiuc.edu (Milt Epstein)
Subject: Re: Ambiguity a goal of language
Reply-To: epstein@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 05:45:42 GMT

In <1992Apr3.201455.5186@Csli.Stanford.EDU> scobbie@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Jim Scobbie) writes:

>Just a final thought from me as this topic winds down.
>
>Would the people arguing that ambiguity is a bad thing count a
>sentence such as 

Well, although I personally questioned some of the things said by the
people who said how nice ambiguity was, I hope I was not considered to
be arguing that ambiguity is a bad thing.  I agree that it is very
useful.  My concern was more whether ambiguity had evolved into
language by design due to its nice properties, or whether it was
present due to other reasons (such as it being unavoidable) and people
just happened to take advantage of it.


>'can you pass the salt'
>
>as ambiguous? After all, it has its literal meaning, and the non-literal
>meaning of a request. Such indirect speech acts are extremely common,
>and function by using one grammatical form for its 'non-obvious' function,
>say a declarative sentence to ask a question or make a request (=command),
>an interrogative to make a statement and so on. It's a bit like a
>double entendre which is grammaticalised - jokes can be made by *ignoring*
>the ambiguity and replying 'yes' without actually passing the salt, rather
>than adding an ambiguity for comic effect. 

This is a tricky one.  It is even trickier if you use as an example
the sentence:

     Do you know what time it is?

since I can easily see that as having several different
interpretations, each very plausible in some situation (e.g. a request
for the time, a warning that it's getting late, an admonition that you
are late).  Actually, that doesn't make it trickier -- it seems to
clearly indicate that these type of statements are ambiguous.  It is
also curious how intonation plays an important role in leading one to
different interpretations.


>Seems to me a good case of 'confusion', 'ambiguity' and 'impreciseness'
>which no language can do without and still call itself natural.

I understand that Chinese has sentence affixes that can be used to
alter the interpretation of yes-no questions of the form of our
examples above.  I wonder how that impacts on the question of
ambiguity -- they seem to serve some purpose of helping to
disambiguate them (by specifying the attitudes/intentions of the
speaker and/or hearer).  Perhaps someone who knows more about this can
comment more accurately.


>If the two opinions being defended here are that (i) utterances ought to be as
>precise as they can be vs (ii) they ought to be as vague as they can, then
>I'd side with the latter. That's all. 

I'm not sure that people would defend such extreme positions on this
issue.  It is also not clear what you mean by "as they can [be]" -- it
almosts sounds like that phrase leads in to "and still be understood",
which would seem to make the question somewhat circular (e.g. if they
can be understood, it doesn't really matter how vague or precise they
are, or perhaps that they can't be too far off in that dimension).

-- 
Milt Epstein
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois
epstein@cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang