Ambiguity

Thomas Wasow

Ambiguity Avoidance is Overrated⁹

1 Introduction

Grice (1975, 30) wrote, “Avoid ambiguity”, as one of several maxims falling under the general category of “Manner”. Gricean maxims are, of course, violable; but violations are normally taken to trigger implicatures, and to occur in order to trigger those implicatures. This particular maxim, however, is routinely violated, for no apparent communicative purpose.¹⁰

In other words, natural language is highly ambiguous. A search of any good dictionary will reveal that most words have multiple definitions, and [as first noted by Zipf (1949)] more frequent words tend to be more ambiguous. Likewise, as computational linguists discovered a few decades ago, most strings of words that constitute ...