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Language
"Neurosis
is the inability to tolerate ambiguity" - Sigmund
Freud
Ambiguity - by Joe Sinclair
Issue No 8 of Nurturing Potential
featured the fourth part of a series of articles on
Language. It ended with the following statement:
Two different types of ambiguity
can be distinguished on the basis of what is causing it:
lexical ambiguity is the
type of ambiguity that arises when a word has multiple
meanings. The word bank is often cited as an instance
of lexical ambiguity; and
structural ambiguity that arises from the fact
that two or more different syntactic structures can be
assigned to one string of words.
The expression old men and women is
structurally ambiguous because it has the following two
structural analyses:
(i)
old [men and women]
(ii) [old men] and women
Enough time has passed. Let's get back
to ambiguity where we left off and see where the trip takes
us.
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