>Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:54:00 -0500
>From: Regina Blass <regina_blass@sil.org>
>To: relevance <relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>, jls <jls@netverk.com.ar>
>Subject: Re: RT, Modified Occam's Razor, and Disambiguation
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> I would like to challenge both Mr. JL and Christophs claim that no
> polysemy is involved in your
>
> old (books and maps) versus
> old books (and maps) examples.
>
> Cruse 2000, shows that lexical items like 'book', 'map', 'CD' are
> items that have FACETS. They have two readings in certain contexts in
> which ambiguity tests are positive. Book has the reading "tome" and
> "text" and as such a sentence can convey different truth conditions
> depending on whether 'tome' or 'text' was meant. For example:
>
> (1) Did you buy an an old book? ( where a novel by Charles Dickens was
> meant)
>
> Can be answered with "yes" and "no":
>
> Answer: Yes, I bought a novel by Charles Dickens
> No, the book was printed in 1999.
>
> The same could apply to 'map'
>
> (2) Did you buy an old map? (where a map about Europe before the
> first world war was meant).
>
> Answer: Yes, I bought a map with Europe at 1900.
> No, the map was printed in 1999.
>
>
> According to this test 'book' and 'map' are polysemous.
>
> However, 'book' and 'map' can also convey both facets at the
> the same time and therefore they are not intuitively polysemous
> to native speakers. They can also fail certain ambiguity tests.
>
> You can say:
>
> (3) John bought an old book. So did Mary.
>
> Which could be interpreted as John and Mary bought old tomes with old
> texts.
>
> However, it would probably be possible to also convey that John bought
> an old tome with a fairly new novel and Mary an old tome with an old
> novel. So the ambiguity test fails here.
>
> To come back to your scope example. The facet readings add further
> complication to your interpretations.
>
> Your 'old books' and maps example will probably allow both facet
> readings to occur.
>
> (4) John bought olds book and maps
>
> can be interpreted as John bought old tomes and a new map (content and
> physical make up - or either of them)
>
>
> However,
>
> (5) John bought old books and old maps
>
> would probably be more restricted to either a 'tome' or 'text' reading
> for both.
>
> So, since we are in fact dealing with polysemous facets
> we have to ask how to approach their disambiguation in pragmatics:
>
> By the principle of relevance the hearer will interpret the utterance
> in the first available context consistent with the communicative
> principle of relevance. If the contextual information leads to a tome
> interpretation, the hearer will access encyclopaedic entries connected
> to 'tome' and enrich the explicature accordingly. If it leads to the
> 'text' interpretation he will enrich the explicature accordingly.
>
> I do not find Grice's answer to those problems very helpful. After all
> he does not give us a MEANS by which to 'avoid ambiguity', RT does.
>
> Regina Blass
> regina_blass@sil.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________
>Subject: RT, Modified Occam's Razor, and Disambiguation
>Author: <jls@netverk.com.ar> at Internet
>Date: 2/22/01 9:26 PM
>
>
>A naive question from a naive philosopher of language.
>
>RT considers that disambiguation is one of the 3 ways (along with reference
>assignment and semantic enrichment) of pragmatic intrusion or penetration in
>the constitution of an "explicature". Now, for Grice, disambiguation, it
>seems, concerns really ambiguous (or polysemous) words, such as "vice", and
>"row", i.e. words which derive from non-cognate roots. I.e., not his
>favoured type of monoguous words that respected his modified Occam's razor
>("do not multiply senses beyond necessity").
>
>Now, what about expressions of the type of
>
>1. old books and maps.
>
>as meaning either
>
>2. old (books and maps).
>
>or
>
>3. (old books) and maps.
>
>It seems we can loosely speak of syntactic "disambiguation" here in terms of
>scope (and thus leading to the constitution of an "explicature") but surely
>no strict lexical or semantic "polysemy" is involved, and thus, I'm not sure
>if the phenomenon involves a case of standard Gricean implicature or even a
>RT "explicature".
>
>Myself, I'm happy, with Grice, in dealing with ambiguity (as in his maxim,
>"avoid ambiguity"), as involving, primarily, polysemy only rather than this
>kind of "alternate syntactic parsings" (Although his discussion of "avoid
>ambiguity" involve the syntactic ambiguity of a poem by Wm Blake, which does
>not really concern different "senses". Is the notion of truth-condition
>general enough to deal with all this. Provided my hasty notes, may sense -
>any comment?
>
>Thanks for any leads,
>
>JL
>(Mr)
>Bs.As.Arg.
>jls@netverk.com.ar
>
>
>
-------------------------------------------------
Robyn Carston
Department of Phonetics & Linguistics, UCL
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Tel: + 44 020 7679 3174
Fax: + 44 020 7383 4108
URL http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/home.htm
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