ABSTRACT
In dealing with different aspects of meaning in the previous two chapters,expressions were treated as though they had only one meaning (though possibly composed of different parts). This is, of course, not the case. Many words have more than one meaning and even complete sentences may allow for several readings. The technical term for this phenomenon is ambiguity: an expression or an utterance is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way. The notion of ambiguity can be applied to all levels of meaning: to expression meaning, utterance meaning and communicative meaning. This chapter has two parts. In the first, we will consider lexical ambiguity, i.e. the ambiguity of words at the level of expression meaning. The notion word will be replaced by the scientific term lexeme (3.1). We will then learn to distinguish between two forms of ambiguity: homonymy and polysemy (3.2). In 3.3 the notion of synonymy is defined. The second part of the chapter is concerned with different readings of sentences and words at the level of utterance meaning that result from meaning shifts (as briefly mentioned in 1.2.2). Several types of shifts, including metaphor and metonymy will be illustrated (3.4) and ascribed to the fact that the interpretation of words and sentences in their context obeys a ‘Principle of Consistent Interpretation’ (3.5). The chapter concludes with a brief reflection of the role which the meaning shifts mentioned play for polysemy.
