Introduction

Words are used to represent things and experiences in the real or imagined world.
Different words can be used to describe the same thing or experience.
Definition
A referent is the concrete object or concept that is designated by a word or expression.
A referent is an object, action, state, relationship, or attribute in the referential realm.
Example
Historically, there was only one person called George Washington, the first president
of the United States. He can be referred to in a text in many ways, such as
 the president
 Mr. Washington
 he, or even
 my friend.
Even though there are many ways to talk about him, there is only one referent in the
referential realm.
Definition
A proposition is that part of the meaning of a clause or sentence that is constant,
despite changes in such things as the voice or illocutionary force of the clause.
A proposition may be related to other units of its kind through interpropositional
relations, such as temporal relations and logical relations.
Discussion
The meaning of the term proposition is extended by some analysts to include the
meaning content of units within the clause.
Example: The tall, stately building fell is said to express propositions corresponding
to the following:
 "The building is tall."
 "The building is stately."
 "The building fell."

Definition
A presupposition is background belief, relating to an utterance, that
 must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the
utterance to be considered appropriate in context
 generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in
the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and
 can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature
(presupposition trigger) in the utterance.
Examples (English)
 The utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he left
Cambridge has the following presuppositions:
 There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and addressee as
John.
  John stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
 John was doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
 John left Cambridge.
 John had been at Cambridge.
Definition:
The presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word. Compare to syntactic
ambiguity.
See also:
 Ambiguity
 Amphiboly
 Context
 Crash Blossom
 Distinctio
 Homophones
 Homographs
 Polysemy
 Psycholinguistics
 Pun
Examples and Observations:
 The Rabbi married my sister.
 She is looking for a match.
 The fisherman went to the bank.
 "[C]ontext is highly relevant to this part of the meaning of utterances. . . . For
example
They passed the port at midnight
is lexically ambiguous. However, it would normally be clear in a given context
which of the two homonyms, 'port' ('harbor') or 'port' ('kind of fortified wine'), is being
used."
--and also which sense of the polysemous verb 'pass' is intended."
(John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995)

 "The following example, taken from Johnson-Laird (1983), illustrates two important
characteristics of lexical ambiguity:
The plane banked just before landing, but then the pilot lost control. The strip on the
field runs for only the barest of yards and the plane just twisted out of the turn before
shooting into the ground.
First, that this passage is not particularly difficult to understand in spite of the fact that
all of its content words are ambiguous suggests that ambiguity is unlikely to invoke
special resource-demanding processing mechanisms but rather is handled as a by-
product of normal comprehension. Second, there are a number of ways in which a
word can be ambiguous. The word plane, for example, has several noun meanings,
and it can also be used as a verb. The word twisted could be an adjective and is also
morphologically ambiguous between the past tense and participial forms of the verb
to twist."
(Patrizia Tabossi et al., "Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution" in
Attention and Performance XV, ed. by C. Umiltà and M. Moscovitch. MIT Press,
1994)
Definition:
The presence of two or more possible meanings in any passage. Also, a fallacy in which the
same term is used in more than one way. Adjective: ambiguous.
See also:
 Lexical Ambiguity
 Syntactic Ambiguity

 Amphiboly
 Crash Blossom
 Double Entendre
 Equivocation
 Garden-Path Sentence
 Polysemy
Etymology:
From the Latin, "wandering about"
Examples and Observations:
 I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.
 We saw her duck.
 Roy Rogers: More hay, Trigger?
Trigger: No thanks, Roy, I'm stuffed!

 Pentagon Plans Swell Deficit

(newspaper headline)
 I can't recommend this book too highly.
 "An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule
witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense: any verbal nuance,
however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of
language. . . .

"We call it ambiguous, I think, when we recognize that there could be a puzzle as to
what the author meant, in that alternative views might be taken without sheer
misreading. If a pun is quite obvious it would not be called ambiguous, because there
is no room for puzzling. But if an irony is calculated to deceive a section of its
readers, I think it would ordinarily be called ambiguous."
(William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1947)

 "Leahy Wants FBI to Help Corrupt Iraqi Police Force"

(headline at CNN.com, December 2006)
 Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
(newspaper headline)
 Union Demands Increased Unemployment
(newspaper headline)
 "Thanks for dinner. I’ve never seen potatoes cooked like that before."
(Jonah Baldwin in the film Sleepless in Seattle, 1993)
 "Quintilian uses amphibolia (III.vi.46) to mean 'ambiguity,' and tells us (Vii.ix.1) that
its species are innumerable; among them, presumably, are Pun and Irony."
(Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Univ. of California Press, 1991)
Pronunciation: am-big-YOU-it-tee
Definition:
The presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of
words. Compare with lexical ambiguity. See also:
 Ambiguity
 Amphiboly
  Crash Blossom
 Garden-Path Sentence
 Syntax
Examples and Observations:
 The professor said on Monday he would give an exam.
 The chicken is ready to eat.
 Visiting relatives can be boring.

 "Some sentences are syntactically ambiguous at the global level, in which case the
whole sentence has two or more possible interpretations. For example, 'They are
cooking apples' is ambiguous because it may or may not mean that apples are being
cooked. . . .

"One of the ways in which listeners work out the syntactic or grammatical structure of
spoken sentences is by using prosodic cues in the form of stress, intonation, and so on.
For example, in the ambiguous sentence 'The old men and women sat on the bench,'
the women may or may not be old. If the women are not old, then the spoken duration
of word 'men' will be relatively long and the stressed syllable in 'women' will have a
steep rise in speech contour. Neither of these prosodic features will be present if the
sentence means the women are old."
(M. Eysenck and M. Keane, Cognitive Psychology. Taylor & Francis, 2005)
 "Syntactic ambiguity occurs when a sequence of words can be structured in
alternative ways that are consistent with the syntax of the language. For instance, . . .
[this word group] is ambiguous:
(1) a. John told the woman that Bill was dating. . . .
In 1a, "that Bill was dating" could either be a relative clause (as in 'John told the
woman that Bill was dating a lie') or a sentence complement (as in 'John told the
woman that Bill was dating a liar')."
(Patrizia Tabossi et al., "Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution" in
Attention and Performance XV, ed. by C. Umiltà. MIT Press, 1994)
Polysemy
where a word as a related number of meanings
i.e.:
mouth
1. pat of a river
2. entrance of a cave
3. part of the body
Mole
1. a small burrowing mammal
2. consequently, there are several different entities called moles (see the Mole
disambiguation page). Although these refer to different things, their names
derive from 1. :e.g. A Mole burrows for information hoping to go undetected.
Bank
1. a financial institution
2. the building where a financial institution offers services
3. a synonym for 'rely upon' (e.g. "I'm your friend, you can bank on me"). It is
different, but related, as it derives from the theme of security initiated by 1
 However: a river bank is a homonym to 1 and 2, as they do not share etymologies. It
is a completely different meaning. River bed, though, is polysemous with the beds on
which people sleep.
Book
1. a bound collection of pages
2. a text reproduced and distributed (thus, someone who has read the same text
on a computer has read the same book as someone who had the actual paper
volume)
3. to make an action or event a matter of record (e.g. "Unable to book a hotel
room, a man sneaked into a nearby private residence where police arrested
him and later booked him for unlawful entry.")
Milk
The verb milk (e.g. "he's milking it for all he can get") derives from the process of
obtaining milk.
Wood
1. a piece of a tree
2. a geographical area with many trees
3. an erection
Crane
1. a bird
2. a type of construction equipment

Homonymy

Where similarity of pronunciation or spelling is accidental

(etimology supports this idea)
i.e.:
bank
1. he ground beside a iver
2. a financial instituion

Several similar linguistic concepts are related to homonymy. These include:

 Homographs (literally "same writing") are usually defined as words that share the
same spelling, regardless of how they are pronounced.[note 1] If they are pronounced
the same then they are also homophones (and homonyms) – for example, bark (the
sound of a dog) and bark (the skin of a tree). If they are pronounced differently then
 they are also heteronyms – for example, bow (the front of a ship) and bow (a type of
knot).
 Homophones (literally "same sound") are usually defined as words that share the
same pronunciation, regardless of how they are spelled.[note 2] If they are spelled the
same then they are also homographs (and homonyms); if they are spelled differently
then they are also heterographs (literally "different writing"). Homographic
examples include rose (flower) and rose (past tense of rise). Heterographic examples
include to, too, two, and there, their, they’re.
 Heteronyms (literally "different name") are the subset of homographs (words that
share the same spelling) that have different pronunciations (and meanings).[note 3] That
is, they are homographs which are not homophones. Such words include desert (to
abandon) and desert (arid region); row (to argue or an argument) and row (as in to
row a boat or a row of seats - a pair of homophones). Heteronyms are also sometimes
called heterophones (literally "different sound").
 Polysemes are words with the same spelling and distinct but related meanings. The
distinction between polysemy and homonymy is often subtle and subjective, and not
all sources consider polysemous words to be homonyms. Words such as mouth,
meaning either the orifice on one's face, or the opening of a cave or river, are
polysemous and may or may not be considered homonyms.
 Capitonyms are words that share the same spelling but have different meanings when
capitalized (and may or may not have different pronunciations). Such words include
polish (to make shiny) and Polish (from Poland); march (organized, uniformed,
steady and rhythmic walking forward) and March (the third month of the year in the
Gregorian Calendar). However, both polish or march at the beginning of sentences
still need to be capitalized.