ABSTRACT
This chapter is from an article published in Applied Linguistics , a journal about applying ideas from linguistics to issues in the world at large. The focus here is misunderstandings of instructions in lottery rules, a study of written language. It is a well-known principle of the common law of contracts that any sentence that is ambiguous must be construed to the favour of the person who did not write the contract. The Massachusetts State Lottery Commission’s (MSLC) interpretation of the rules for the ‘Caesars Palace®’ game does not deny the validity of the reading of the syntax and lexico-semantics of the instructions. In the MSLC’s view, the ‘Caesars Palace®’ game card contains two separate, albeit related, games: ‘Roulette’ on the left and ‘Dice’ on the right.
