On the so-called pragmatic ambiguity
Agnieszka Solska
University of Silesia
One of the fundamental elements of natural language is ambiguity, which can be found at the level of words, phrases and sentences as well as utterances, all of which can on occasion carry multiple meanings. Words can be lexically ambiguous, i.e. they may have more than one clearly demarcated sense, as is the case with the word file in example (1), where the absence of contextual information makes it impossible to determine whether the object needed is a folder for keeping papers, a metal tool for smoothing surfaces or a collection of computer data. Phrases and sentences can be structurally ambiguous, i.e. they can have more than one underlying structure, as can be seen in (2), which can refer either to an Egyptian who teaches history or to a teacher who teaches the history of Egypt, and in (3), whose diverse readings depend on whether the prepositional phrase with a book is to be treated as the postmodifier of the noun student or as the adjunct adverbial in the verb phrase.
(1) We need a bigger file.
(2) An Egyptian history teacher.
(3) The teacher hit the student with a book.
In linguistics ambiguity is typically treated as a property of linguistic expressions rather than utterances since it is lexical and structural ambiguities that allow for the different truth conditions of the proposition expressed by the utterance in which they occur. The need to distinguish pragmatic ambiguity as another subcategory of ambiguity is often questioned (cf. Kent, 2002) since speaker meaning by its very nature is not fully determinable, which is why confused addressees sometimes feel compelled to produce requests for clarification and ask such questions as Are you being ironic? or Is this a threat or a promise? Obviously resolving ambiguities concerning the illocutionary force or the communicative intention of the speaker is tantamount to establishing the speaker meaning of the utterance. However, apart from such non- truth conditional ambiguities, it is possible to find utterances which are ambiguous in the sense that it is not clear whether the utterance should be treated as a case of a represented thought or a metarepresented thought, which would cause the addressee to entertain two diverse interpretations at the same time. Quite a few examples of such utterances are discussed by Reboul (2001).
The aim of this paper is to offer some thoughts on what constitutes pragmatic ambiguity of the type described by Reboul, to specify what makes this type of ambiguity different from linguistic ambiguity, and to determine what types of merarepresentational discourse are likely to trigger it.
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