Eckhard Bick - VISL

Semantic ambiguity
analytical (structural)
lexical functional
(1) polysemy
fato-1 ('fact')
fato-2 ('suit')
fato-3 ('flock')
(2) polylexicals
ter boas razões para..
('have good reasons
to ..')
ter razão
('to be right')
The above sequence of semantic ambiguity types mirrors and supplants, in a way,
what has been said about ambiguity on lower levels: Thus, the lexical level of
polysemy corresponds to homonymy, and more specifically, to lexeme category
ambiguity (type 1 of morphological ambiguity), while the analytical and functional
types mirror the corresponding syntactic ambiguity classes of syntactic form and
syntactic function. Of course, lower level distinctions can imply higher level ones
(this upward implication is one important aspect of progressive level parsing,
downward application of lexical categories being another one), as shown for the
intermediate level syntactic word classes. Thus, treating the semantic ambiguity
types 2-4 as syntactically inspired, one might call thematic roles semantic arguments,
polylexical meaning could be regarded as a side effect of a very closely knitted
syntactic relation, and scope could be described as the semantic result of operator
attachment. Conversely, the cohesion section of syntactic ambiguity (anaphora and
co-ordination) might be seen as a syntactic description of semantic structure.
In the three diagrams above, the difference between the semantic ambiguity
level and the two lower levels is that, for polysemy, polylexical meaning, scope and
thematic roles, none of the existing morphological or syntactic tags can capture the
ambiguity in a principled way on the word itself, since both (semantic) readings will
receive the same lower level analysis:
(10)
type 1: fato N M S
type 2: ter razão @ voltava três vezes/rubins
- 106 -
(3) scope
Não compre três
garrafas de vinho,
compre quatro/cerveja!
('Don't buy [three]
bottles of wine, buy
four !' - 'Don't buy
[three bottles of wine],
(4) thematic roles
O sacrifício da moça
('The sacrificing of the
girl')
o duende voltava três
vezes/rubins.
('The dwarf returned
three times/rubies.')