Реферат: Problem of meaning ambiguity in a language

• 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

• 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.

3. Unarticulated Constituentism: Many sentences semantically express propositions some of whose constituents are not the semantic contents of any of the sentence’s constituents.

4. Anti-propositionalism: Many sentences do not semantically express propositions, even in contexts (because of lexical underspecificity, phrasal underdetermination, or propositional incompleteness).

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).

6. Outright Anti-semanticism: Many sentences do not have (compositionally determined) semantic contents at all.

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.

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.

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.

5. Re-evaluation of Verb. Aspect meaning

Functional re-evaluation of grammatical forms is a source of constant linguistic interest. We may say that whatever may be the other problems of grammar learning the polysemantic character of grammatical forms is always primary in importance.

Most grammatical forms are polysemantic. On this level of linguistic analysis distinction should be made between synchronic and potential polysemy.

The aspective meaning of the verb reflects the mode of the realization of the process. The opposition of the continuous forms of the verb to the non-continuous represents the aspective category of development. In symbolic notation it is represented by the formula be...ing. The primary denotative meaning of the Present Continuous is characterised by three semantic elements : a) present time, b) something progressive, c) contact with the moment of speech. The three meanings make up its synchronic polysemy.

By potential polysemy we mean the ability of a grammatical form to have different connotative meanings in various contexts of its uses. Examine for illustration the connotative (syntagmatic) meanings of the Present Continuous signalled by the context in the following sentences:

Brian said to his cousin: "I'm signing on as well in a way, only for life. I'm getting married." Both stopped walking. Bert took his arm and stared: "You're not."

"I am. To Pauline (Sillitoe) — future time reference. "It was a wedding in the country. The best man makes a speech. He is beaming all over his face, and he calls for attention... (Gordon) — past time reference; ... "I'm sorry" , he said, his teeth together, "You're not going in there" . (Gordon) — the Present Continuous with the implication of imperative modality;

" I am always thinking of him", said she. (Maugham) — recurrent actions; She is always grumbling about trifles — the qualitative Present, the permanent characteristic of the subject.

Four combinations of the continuous and the indefinite are possible in principle in Modern English. E.g.: While I was typing, Mary and Tom were chatting in the adjoining room. While I typing, Tom and Mary were chatting in the adjoining room. While I was typing, they chatted in ... While I typed, they chatted.