ination.
Although ambiguity is fundamentally a property of linguistic expressions, people are also said to be ambiguous on occasion in how they use language. This can occur if, even when their words are unambiguous, their words do not make what they mean uniquely determinable. Strictly speaking, however, ambiguity is a semantic phenomenon, involving linguistic meaning rather than speaker meaning; 'Pragmatic ambiguity' is an oxymoron. Generally when one uses ambiguous words or sentences, one does not consciously entertain their unintended meanings, although there is psycholinguistic evidence that when one hears ambiguous context of utterance words one momentarily accesses and then rules out their irrelevant senses. When people use ambiguous language, generally its ambiguity is not intended. Occasionally, however, ambiguity is deliberate, as with an utterance of 'I'd like to see more of you' when intended to be taken in more than one way in the very same. br/>
4. Semantic ambiguity
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Sentences whose semantic contents seem to differ in different contexts, in virtue of containing expressions of such sorts as the following (there may be others):
• indexicals/demonstratives: [Tense], I, today, now, here, we, you, she, they, then, there, that, those
• relational terms: neighbor, fan, enemy, local, foreign
• perspectival terms: left, distant, up, behind, foreground, horizon, faint, occluded, clear, obscure
• gradable adjectives, both relative and absolute: tall, old, fast, smart; flat, empty, pure, dry
• philosophically interesting terms: know, might, necessary, if, ought, free
• prepositions: in, on, to, at, for, with
• certain short verbs: put, get, go, take
• possessive phrases, adjectival phrases, noun-noun pairs: John's car, John's hometown, John's boss, John's company; fast car, fast driver, fast tires, fast time; child abuse, drug abuse; vitamin pill, pain pill, diet pill, sleeping pill
• implicit temporal, spatial, and quantifier domain restriction
• weather and other environmental reports: (It is) raining, humid, noon, summer, noisy, eerie p> • ostensibly unary expressions (when used without complements) that denote binary relations: ready, late, finish, strong enough
• "predicates of personal taste ": fun, boring, tasty, cute, sexy, gross, cool
• miscellaneous: and, or, cut, (is) green
The problems with these content misunderstandings are as follow:
1.Contextualist platitude: Many sentences, even with all their constituents being used literally and even factoring out ambiguity, can be used to mean different things in different contexts. (This doesn't entail that there's anything context-sensitive in or about the sentence itself.)
2. Anti-compositionalism: Many (declarative) sentences semantically express propositions that are not completely determined by the semantic contents of their constituents and their syntactic structure. p> 3. Unarticulated Constituentism: Many sentences semantically express propositions some of whose constituents are not the semantic contents of any of the sentence's constituents. p> 4. Anti-propositionalism: Many sentences do not semantically express propositions, even in contexts (because of lexical underspecificity, phrasal underdetermination, or propositional incompleteness). p> 5. Psychological Anti-semanticism: The compositionally determined semantic content of a sentence, whether or not fully propositional, plays no role in the psychological processes involved in communication (on either the speaker's or the hearer's side). p> 6. Outright Anti-semanticism: Many sentences do not have (compositionally determined) semantic contents at all. p> 7. Utterance "Contextualism": The semantic content of almost any given sentence, whether or not it is fully propositional, falls short of the "intuitive content" of a likely utterance of the sentence because its semantic content is too sketchy, abstract, or otherwise nonspecific to be what the speaker means.
Three forms of semantic contents (each can be stronger or weaker as to range of application and role of context, and perhaps different versions apply to different classes of expressions):
1. Indexical Contextualism: The semantic contents of many sentences vary because they contain "non-obvious" indexical expressions whose contents are determined by context. p> 2. Variable Contextualism: The semantic contents of many sentences vary because they contain expressions that have variables associated with them whose values ​​are determined by context. p> 3. Modulational Contextualism: The semantic contents of many sentences vary because they contain expressions whose senses (and/or phrases whose modes of composition) are "modulated" by context. br/...
