Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 December 20

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 20

Word for "more than just ambiguous"?

Is there a word that means something is not merely ambiguous (has two meanings) but has multiple possible meanings? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:46, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Polysemous, perhaps, although ambiguous can certainly be used to refer to something with more than two meanings, as our article Ambiguity implies. Deor (talk) 20:36, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

The article doesn't "imply"; it is, uhmmm... unambiguous: Ambiguity is a type of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible. (emphasis added) —107.15.157.44 (talk) 06:02, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, "polysemous" is a perfect fit for my need. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:30, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

OP says the question is answered. The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

The article here says that "Lexicographers define polysemes within a single dictionary lemma, numbering different meanings, while homonyms are treated in separate lemmata." I haven't seen "polysemy" used in any other way (and the OED doesn't note any), though I'm willing to believe that it has been used in other ways. The article goes on to say that "For Dick Hebdige[14] polysemy means that, 'each text is seen to generate a potentially infinite range of meanings,'" and so forth, but Hebdige doesn't seem to be a linguist of any kind.

Here's one common kind of polysemy in English. Many areas meriting study share their names with the study of that area. Thus we can talk of the geography of this or that place (its rivers and so on), and also of the geography (study) of that area. (Likewise for "psychology", etc.) This may give rise to plenty of ambiguity if you're a computer; but if you're a human who's pretty fluent in English and the text is competently written (or the speaker is at least moderately articulate), you'll normally be able to infer which kind of "geography" it is from the text without any trouble.

"Ambiguity" encompasses much more. "Time flies like an arrow" is ambiguous; it's not polysemous. (And its ambiguity depends in part on homonymy; polysemy has little or nothing to do with it. More.coffy (talk) 08:22, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

How is "Time flies like an arrow" ambiguous? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:41, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Baseball_Bugs -- in Natural Language Parsing and some related areas of AI research and linguistics, there's an old slogan "Times flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana". Oh god, I just now found out that Wikipedia even has an article Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana! -- AnonMoos (talk) 01:55, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

It's not inherently ambiguous by itself, unless there's such an insect as a time fly. The two comments in combination are just a play on words. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:45, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

That's not how linguists or artificial intelligence researchers in the field of natural language understanding usually view the matter, however. They would say that the syntax component generates the various possible syntactic parses, and some parses are then excluded as meaningful possibilities by bringing to bear real-world knowledge. If you applied real-world knowledge as part of the basic process of generating syntactic parses (instead of using it to filter parses after they've been generated), then that would violate cognitive modularity. Scholars have a lot of different opinions on how real and how important cognitive modularity is, but the less the human brain is organized according to cognitive modularity principles, the harder it's going to be to understand how it works... AnonMoos (talk) 00:22, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

AnonMoos puts it very well. Baseball Bugs, your first question "How is 'Time flies like an arrow' ambiguous?" surprised me because it suggested that you were unfamiliar with this sentence, which is a staple of introductory books that are more or less about lexical semantics. (In my perhaps unrepresentative experience, it's quite a bit commoner than Buffalo×8, and instead is up there with colorless green ideas.) As for the notion that "[t]he two comments in combination are just a play on words," you might ask what it is that constitutes this play on words, and what plays on words are. More.coffy (talk) 03:18, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

The first sentence by itself can only have one meaning, as "flies" can only be a verb in that sentence, assuming there's no such insect as a time fly. The second sentence can theoretically have two meanings, due to the grammatical ambiguity of "fruit flies". Obviously there is an insect called a fruit fly, and if you use your imagination you could see the verb usage, of fruit flying through the air ("like a banana [does]"). Kind of goofy, but grammatically acceptable. Combining the two sentences, you get a joke, a play on words often attributed to Groucho Marx and probably much older. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:28, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Baseball_Bugs -- your procedure of immediately excluding any parse which contains "Time Flies" as a noun phrase based on your knowledge of which kinds of flies exist in the world may seem like a good procedure, but it's just not the way things are usually done in linguistics or in computational language parsing. It would also block the understanding of novel noun compounds -- such as the first time you heard "text message" etc... AnonMoos (talk) 04:05, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

P.S. While somewhat similar word play goes back a long time, this particular example originated in a context of early 1960s linguistics/AI research -- see my comments at Talk:Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana... AnonMoos (talk) 06:31, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm reminded of this letter to Byte magazine from the 1980s. ~Anachronist (talk) 04:40, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Interesting, that a decade could send a letter to a magazine. — Seriously though, was "from the 1980s" easier to type than "from 1986"? Not picking on you particularly, why do people do that? Would specifying the more exact year (when it's handy) feel too fussy or something? —Tamfang (talk) 22:25, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Where is the article that says there's more than one possible meaning to "time flies like an arrow"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:54, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Where? Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana#Analysis of the basic ambiguities. (As AnonMoos pointed out at 01:55, 24 December 2018.) But have you really not encountered it in any linguistics text? More.coffy (talk) 08:05, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

They're saying you could use "time" as a verb. Fine. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:30, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Actually, not fine. The alleged ambiguity only exists for those who don't speak English and are unaware that "time flies", by itself, is an old expression with only one meaning. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:34, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

If even one demographic finds it ambiguous, then it is ambiguous. Akld guy (talk) 22:31, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

English has an endless supply of words that can be used in more than one way. ("What has four wheels and flies?") As for the word "fly", whether noun or verb it comes from the same thing. And "time flies" is a common English saying which means only one thing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:41, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

You're referring of course to the metaphorical sense, but there is another sense for Time flies like an arrow... as in "time them the flies (edited - maybe this makes what I meant clearer) with a stopwatch", as you would time the flight of an arrow. Your "those who don't speak English" might take the literal stopwatch meaning, therefore to them, it's ambiguous. Akld guy (talk) 04:53, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm looking forward to your finding such a weird usage. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:34, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I don't need to find it. The onus is on you to show that that sentence construction could not exist or that it fails the test of grammar, or is in some other way deficient. You have insisted that the metaphorical sense of the phrase with time used as a noun is the only meaning possible. I've given another valid construction. Akld guy (talk) 05:46, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I would say the onus is on you to demonstrate that such a bizarre interpretation is actually used in normal English. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:24, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

All things are timed the same way. The stopwatch is started at some designated beginning and stopped at some designated end. Does it make a difference if we are timing arrows or flies or airplanes? No one familiar with the use of a stopwatch would find the ambiguity that you are suggesting is possible. Bus stop (talk) 06:07, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs, I sense that you (and Bus stop) are conflating semantics and pragmatics. Yes, it's unlikely that any naive speaker of L1 English (one who had neither been exposed to this little matter nor had been prompted to think about it very deeply) would say that "Time flies like an arrow" has anything other than a single idiomatic meaning (one in which fly is a verb meaning "To move or travel swiftly, pass rapidly, rush along", as the OED puts it). "Combining the two sentences," you say, "you get a joke." True, and the pragmatics helps the joke. But the joke enlivens a serious point in linguistics. Sentence processing, an area within psycholinguistics, often deals with "garden-path sentences"; what we have here is a (perhaps overused) garden-path sentence pair. That Groucho Marx may or may not have said it in no way detracts from its interest to discussion of the parsing of syntactic ambiguity. (And how widely used is it in more or less academic contexts? Try this list at Google Scholar or this one at Google Books.) Incidentally, I am astounded to learn (from Bus stop, above) that everything is timed the same way, with a stopwatch. (Perhaps Bus stop and I are living in different universes.) More.coffy (talk) 06:32, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I don't mean a stopwatch literally. But when we refer to timing something we are starting the timing and stopping the timing at a designated beginning and a designated ending. Isn't that what is meant in all instances by timing something? Bus stop (talk) 07:19, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, Bus stop: I came back here because it occurred to me that I might have sounded a bit snarky and intended to do a little rephrasing. But actually....no, I disagree with you. I can time some event or phenomenon by for example seeing how many times something else can be done in its duration. Moreover, neither our knowledge of the world nor my imagination about one or more possible worlds should limit us: a language (such as English) must be able to cater for science fiction written by people far more imaginative than I am. And limited though my imagination is, I can imagine that people somewhere may even now (perhaps prompted by this witticism cum didactic example) be referring to timers, or some kind of timers, as "arrows". (Or that, perhaps similarly prompted, they may be referring to some kind of flying beastie as an "arrow".) Pragmatic considerations (notably our knowledge of how the world works and our knowledge that this or that is an established idiom) constrain how we interpret (here, even how we parse) potentially ambiguous sentences. But we shouldn't assume that such considerations always do constrain. If we look at the article garden-path sentence we see ways in which what starts as the obvious interpretation of a sentence is proven wrong. The examples given there are very clear-cut and neat, in order to be easier to understand. In the real world, when we're copy-editors (e.g. when improving well-intentioned but hurriedly assembled Wikipedia articles), we encounter messier examples of sentences that are troublesome in a similar way. Simply described, they're poorly written. Our ability to parse them in two ways (perhaps only after the second or third reading) and ascribe non-obvious interpretations is something we possess; if we didn't, we wouldn't be able to improve them. More.coffy (talk) 07:59, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I think neither Bus stop nor coffy grasped what I meant, so I have edited what I wrote. Scroll up to see. Akld guy (talk) 09:05, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I understood what you meant, Akld guy. I said "All things are timed the same way." Doesn't that suggest that I understood what you said? Bus stop (talk) 15:03, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

No. The flight of an arrow cannot be timed with a grandfather clock for instance. It can only be timed with a stopwatch or electronic device. If the situation is that the flight of flies is to be timed over a very short distance, the instruction "Time (the flight of) flies like an arrow" would be appropriate in telling the listener how to make the measurement. Anyway, you've managed to put up a strawman argument about types of timing, which has nothing to do with whether the sentence using "time" as a verb is viable. I have demonstrated that Bugs was wrong in saying that "Time flies like an arrow" can have only one meaning. Akld guy (talk) 19:54, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Why can't the flight of an arrow be timed with a grandfather clock? Bus stop (talk) 22:00, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I think one could also say that something is open to "multiple interpretations" or that it could mean a "variety of things" or that it "could easily mean several different things". Bus stop (talk) 04:43, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Polysemous means "of many sides", which is kind of in the neighborhood. Ambiguous is often thought of as having two meanings, but it's not restricted to two. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:44, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

If polysemous means "of many sides", Baseball Bugs, then this is a meaning that has eluded the OED (in an entry most recently revised in 2006). (An etymological fallacy, perhaps?) The OED tells us: "That has a multiplicity of meanings, or bears many different interpretations; spec. designating a word that exhibits polysemy." (And this is all that it tells us.) OED on polysemy (also 2006): "Linguistics The fact of having several meanings; the possession of multiple meanings, senses, or connotations." (Again, this is all that it tells us.) More.coffy (talk) 08:09, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

We have an article on Polysemy. A seme (from Ancient Greek σῆμα) is a representation or sign. Dbfirs 08:31, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs, you often refer to that Etymology Online website as though it's a dictionary, which it clearly isn't. What it actually gives is the origin of words, which is not the same thing at all. And in this case, it's even wrong, as "polysemous" is not etymologically related to "many-sided", it's related to "having many meanings" . --Viennese Waltz 10:35, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

The Etymology Online entry for polysemy has the correct etymology, though. Curious. Deor (talk) 16:59, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I took "many sides" to mean "many meanings", not physical "sides" as in a polygon. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:22, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

<coff, coff...> So, have any of you actually noticed that the OP had said thanks, picked up his ball, and went home, several days ago already? Could your time not be spent more productively on still open questions? Is this a Refdesk or the "let's all just argue endlessly about random crap just for the hell of it" page?

Just for the record, I am the OP. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:29, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

So noted. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:43, 27 December 2018 (UTC)