- (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} entangledbank) wrote,@ 2004-08-14 23:44:00 |
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Two Kinds of Ambiguity
A couple of examples in today's Independent of structures that are theoretically ambiguous but pragmatically not. What's interesting is that the resolution is very different in the two cases.
One is a headline Continent-wide force to counter terror planned by EU defence chief. Now I'm as amused at the next person by these ambiguous placement jokes, or things like 'Magistrates to act on strip shows', but I always rather doubted whether they were genuine. But here's an example before me, and I don't think subeditors are allowed to have much of a sense of humour, so I think this is a genuine ambiguity they didn't notice. And it is grammatically quite ambiguous: a slight shift in real-world facts would make the other reading sensible. But we don't really have a problem reading it; pragmatics tells us what's intended.
More interesting is this gem in a letter to the editor. The writer claimed to have seen a sign saying Pedestrian Casualty Reduction Signals Timing Experiment, and asked the snarky and rhetorical question 'Have we now decided that it is easier to place key words together and let readers work out the meaning themselves?'. To which the snarky answer is: Well yes, as opposed to what exactly?
Cos you put six nouns together in a row, in theory you've got some combinatorial explosion, I dunno, 6! or T6 or something. But in this example I just cannot see an alternative reading. Every other [N N] combination gets knocked on the head because it's not interpretable. I never liked Chomsky's idea of a Feynman diagram where all possibilities are simultaneously evaluated, and those that don't satisfy constraints are closed down; but that seems to be what's happening here. None of the multifarious [N N] possibilities make sense. 'Reduction signals' yes, I can make sense of that, but it doesn't fit higher up. In the end the only recursively intelligible interpretation wins.
A couple of examples in today's Independent of structures that are theoretically ambiguous but pragmatically not. What's interesting is that the resolution is very different in the two cases.
One is a headline Continent-wide force to counter terror planned by EU defence chief. Now I'm as amused at the next person by these ambiguous placement jokes, or things like 'Magistrates to act on strip shows', but I always rather doubted whether they were genuine. But here's an example before me, and I don't think subeditors are allowed to have much of a sense of humour, so I think this is a genuine ambiguity they didn't notice. And it is grammatically quite ambiguous: a slight shift in real-world facts would make the other reading sensible. But we don't really have a problem reading it; pragmatics tells us what's intended.
More interesting is this gem in a letter to the editor. The writer claimed to have seen a sign saying Pedestrian Casualty Reduction Signals Timing Experiment, and asked the snarky and rhetorical question 'Have we now decided that it is easier to place key words together and let readers work out the meaning themselves?'. To which the snarky answer is: Well yes, as opposed to what exactly?
Cos you put six nouns together in a row, in theory you've got some combinatorial explosion, I dunno, 6! or T6 or something. But in this example I just cannot see an alternative reading. Every other [N N] combination gets knocked on the head because it's not interpretable. I never liked Chomsky's idea of a Feynman diagram where all possibilities are simultaneously evaluated, and those that don't satisfy constraints are closed down; but that seems to be what's happening here. None of the multifarious [N N] possibilities make sense. 'Reduction signals' yes, I can make sense of that, but it doesn't fit higher up. In the end the only recursively intelligible interpretation wins.
