One could say as well that constraints are established by the compact implicit between writers and readers, the content of that compact being a nisus toward disambiguation. These constraints, and/or relations, are the content, so to speak, of context, which lends weight to the enterprise of overcoming linguistic underspecification.The reason [] that ambiguity is more elaborate in poetry than in prose . . . seems to be that the presence of metre and rhyme, admittedly irrelevant to the straightforward process of conveying a statement, makes it seem sensible to diverge from the colloquial order of statement, and so imply several colloquial orders from which the statement has diverged. . . . Rhythm allows one, by playing off the possible prose rhythms against the super-imposed verse rhythms, to combine a variety of statements in one order (Empson 30). The idea of subsuming lexical ambiguity in the semantic structure is discussed in the literature as context, which is associated with both semantic and lexical ambiguity. In the foregoing example, what would have the greatest potential to disambiguate the original statement would be the context in which it presented. Su sharpens the distinction when identifying lexical ambiguity simply as the possibility that "two or more distinct meanings or readings are tenable in a given context, rendering choice between the alternatives an uncertain one" (Su 55; emphasis added). What that suggests is that the semantic context contains the relevant lexeme. Indeed, the notion of context is an extremely important feature of discourse, identification, and disambiguation of lexical ambiguity. That point is made by Read in a comment on the interpenetration of lexical and semantic issues that indirectly comments as well on the nature of linguistic ambiguity in general: That is not so either, because language is a social product, with constraints established by interpersonal relations (Read 503; emphasis added). Su, Soon Peng. Lexical |
