y ' as opposites. Another is the conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence, 'The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court '. Evidence that the word ' sui t' (not to mention ' press ') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the 'crossed interpretation' of the sentence, on which ' suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and ' one ' to a legal action. p> The above examples of ambiguity are each a case of one word with more than one meaning. However, it is not always clear when we have only one word. The verb ' desert ' and the noun ' dessert' , which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinct words (they are homonyms). So do the noun ' bear ' and the verb 'bear ', even though they not only sound the same but are spelled the same? These examples may be clear cases of homonymy, but what about the noun 'respect' and the verb ' respect ' or the preposition ' over' and the adjective ' over' ? Are the members of these pairs homonyms or different forms of the same word? There is no general consensus on how to draw the line between cases of one ambiguous word and cases of two homonymous words. Perhaps the difference is ultimately arbitrary. p> Sometimes one meaning of a word is derived from another. For example, the cognitive sense of 'see' seems derived from its visual sense. The sense of ' weigh ' in 'He weighed the package ' is derived from its sense in ' The package weighed two pounds '. Similarly, the transitive senses of 'burn', 'fly' and 'walk' are derived from their intransitive senses. Now it could be argued that in each of these cases the derived sense does not really qualify as a second meaning of the word but is actually the result of a lexical operation on the underived sense. This argument is plausible to the extent that the phenomenon is systematic and general, rather than peculiar to particular words. Lexical semantics has the task of identifying and characterizing such systematic phemena. It is also concerned to explain the rich and subtle semantic behavior of common and highly flexible words like the verbs 'do' and ' put' and the prepositions ' At ', 'in' and 'to' . Each of these words has uses which are so numerous yet so closely related that they are often described as 'polysemous' rather than ambiguous. В
3. Structural ambiguity
В
Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan history teacher' , 'a student of high moral principles ' and ' short men and women ', and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting relatives can be boring '. These ambiguities are said to be structural because each such phrase can be represented in two structurally different ways, eg, ' [Tibetan history] teacher ' and ' Tibetan [history teacher ] '. Indeed, the existence of such ambiguities provides strong evidence for a level of underlying syntactic structure. Consider the structurally ambiguous sentence, 'The chicken is ready to eat ', which could be used to describe either a hungry chicken or a broiled chicken. It is arguable that the operative reading depends on whether or not the implicit subject of the infinitive clause 'to eat' is tied anaphorically to the subject ( 'the chicken' ) of the main clause.
It is not always clear when we have a case of structural ambiguity. Consider, for example, the elliptical sentence, 'Perot knows a richer man than Trump' . It has two meanings, that Perot knows a man who is richer than Trump and that Perot knows man who is richer than any man Trump knows, and is therefore ambiguous. But what about the sentence 'John loves his mother and so does Bill '? It can be used to say either that John loves John's mother and Bill loves Bill's mother or that John loves John's mother and Bill loves John's mother. But is it really ambiguous? One might argue that the clause 'so does Bill 'is unambiguous and may be read unequivocally as saying in the context that Bill does the same thing that John does, and although there are two different possibilities for what counts as doing the same thing, these alternatives are not fixed semantically. Hence the ambiguity is merely apparent and better described as semantic underdeterm...
