Ambiguity: Some Bibliographical Notes

Jonathan Pool
Revised 2006/05/06

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Dimensions, Types, and Relatives of Ambiguity

Al-Najjar, 2005: Undescribable events: a property of theoretical contracts. Infinite complexity of potential state of world makes its description prohibitively costly in contracts.

Bach, 1998: types = {lexical, structural}, {act/object, type/token, process/product, scope}. Relatives = {vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness, indexicality, semantic underdetermination, lexical underdetermination, nonliterality, indirection, homonymy}.

Barker, 2002: Vagueness includes predication that is imprecise as to degree (e.g., "X is tall"). Any assertion that includes such a predication may give factual or metalinguistic information.

Battigalli, 2002: Incompleteness: a property of theoretical and empirical contracts and instructions (with or without conflict of interest). Caused by costs of description. Types: {discretion, rigidity}.

Berry, 2003: Multiple types and subtypes from linguistic and legal theories.

Ceccato, 2004: Types and subtypes of ambiguity are:

Clark, 1996: Models language use in a way that makes ambiguity ubiquitous but problematic, since it is impossible to define the meaning of any expression. Any expression joins with other elements of action of the speaker and others to convey multiple things, such as beliefs, intentions, expectations, wishes, preferences, and promises. The meaning is not compositional.

Dayal, 2004: The conditions under which nominals are ambiguous between (1) definite or indefinite identifiers and (2) kinds are complex.

Dušková, 1995: "Syntactic ambiguity is defined as a property of sentences arising from multiple interpretations of a field of syntactic relations. Although a wide range of ambiguities in English have analogous counterparts in Czech, various types of homonymy in English create ambiguous sentences with Czech counterparts for each reading. Among the latter are those due to homonymy of (1) subordinate clause types introduced by a wh-phrase, (2) subordination functions including successive modification, (3) universal quantifier scope in sentences with total negation, (4) the sentence position of prepositions & particles, & (5) postmodifying & adverbial functions. Ambiguities due to the absence of formal indicators of case & verbal categories in English are also exemplified."

Eggleston, 2000: Contracts have values on "completeness" and on "complexity". Completeness has 2 types: p-completeness and f-completeness. Assume a contract specifies payoffs to both parties under various future states. P-completeness is the specification of all payoff-relevant states and their respective payoffs, and f-completeness is the specification of all verifiable ones. Complexity has 3 dimensions, 1 of which is the multiplicity of states for which payoffs are itemized. So, a contract can be incomplete but complex on that dimension if there are many payoff-relevant states and the contract specifies payoffs for many of them but still not for all. And it can be complete but simple if it specifies payoffs for all states but there aren't many (or many verifiable ones).

Gifford, 1999: A contract's completeness is the extent to which it specifies an action for an event. Parties to a contract are assumed able to make it complete but to decide how much of their limited attention to allocate to advancing its completeness as an alternative to doing so for other contracts.

Hawkins, 2004: Ambiguity is the assignment of multiple conventionally specified properties to the same form. Vagueness is the assignment to a form of a property that has many non-conventionalized extensions. Zero specification is the assignment of a completely underspecified attribute to a form. See pp. 39-40.

Hoefler, 2005b: Ambiguity types: {nonstructural, structural}. Nonstructural ambiguity types: {pragmatic, lexical}. Lexical ambiguity types: {homonymy, polysemy}. Structural (compositional) ambiguity types: {syntactic, semantic}. Syntactic ambiguity types: {attachment, referential, categorial}. Semantic ambiguity types: {scope, plural}. All ambiguity types can exist in compositional languages; structural ambiguity can exist in compositional languages, but not in holistic languages.

Hutchins, 1992: Ambiguity types: {morphological, lexical, structural}, {monolingual, transfer}, {real, systemic}. Morphological ambiguity is ambiguity with respect to the morphological analysis of a word, i.e. where the morpheme boundaries are. Lexical ambiguity types: {categorial ambiguity, homography, polysemy}. Structural ambiguity includes quantifier scope ambiguity. Ambiguity is defined as distinct from anaphora antecedent uncertainty, but "anaphora can be thought of as a sort of ambiguity" (p. 95).

Norvig, 1987: Traditional "dimensions" (but aren't these really types?) of ambiguity are:

Lexical ambiguity is further describable on the dimension (types?) of polysemy versus homonymy.

Trujillo, 1999: Sources of ambiguity include part of speech, syntactic structure, word sense, scope, anaphora, definite reference, and ellipsis. Stages at which disambiguation is necessary in machine translation are analysis, transfer, and generation.

Wasow, 2003: Ambiguity versus vagueness = multiplicity of denotations versus unclear boundary of denotation. Types of ambiguity include lexical, syncretic, coordinational, scopal, unnamed (e.g., "The chicken is ready to eat"), complex (e.g., "Flying planes can be dangerous"), categorial, syntactic, attachment.

Yarowsky, 1996: Text-to-speech synthesis requires the resolution of lexical homographs classifiable into 7 major categories.

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