#scope ambiguity

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 91: Scoping out the scope of scope

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typical in this situation". Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope. We talk about how humour often relies on scope ambiguity, such as a cake with "Happy Birthday in red text" written on it (quotation scope ambiguity) and the viral bench plaque "In Memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn't smile" (negation scope ambiguity). We also talk about how linguists collect fun examples of ambiguity going about their everyday lives, how gesture and intonation allow us to disambiguate most of the time, and using several scopes in one sentence for double plus ambiguity fun.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the forms that our thoughts take inside our heads! We talk about an academic paper from 2008 called "The phenomena of inner experience", and how their results differ from the 2023 Lingthusiasm listener survey questions on your mental pictures and inner voices. We also talk about more unnerving methodologies, like temporarily paralyzing people and then scanning their brains to see if the inner voice sections still light up (they do!).

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Wikipedia entry for Everything Bagel

'Shel Silverstein's hot dog and the domain of "everything"' post on Language Log

Wikipedia entry for 'Scop' (an oral poet)

'New publication: Reported evidentiality in Tibeto-Burman languages' post on Superlinguo

Wikipedia entry for Tom Swifty

'Bench in honour of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn't smile' post on All Things Linguistic

WALS entry for Feature 144B: Position of negative words relative to beginning and end of clause and with respect to adjacency to verb

'A few notes on negative clauses, polarity items, and scope'

'I didn't ask you to kill him' Learning English post on sentence stress and meaning

'I didn't ask you to kill him' sentence stress example in action by @dheanasaur on TikTok (⚠︎warning, loud sound)

Non-manual Markers in ASL / NMM's

'The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect' by Simon Harrison

'Quantifier Scope Jokes' post on All Things Linguistic

'Caring for your baby since 1890' ambiguity post on All Things Linguistic

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[allthingslinguistic]

Semantics: Crash Course Linguistics #5 

If you want to know what a word means, all you have to do is look it up in the dictionary, right? Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about semantics, or the area of linguistics concerned with meaning. We’ll learn about different types of semantic relationships, and how different languages define these relationships, as well as different approaches to semantics. And we’ll discover that the humble definition may be more complicated than we think.

For more semantics resources, including semantics-related exercises from the linguistics olympiads to try, check out this week’s issue of Mutual Intelligibility. 

[allthingslinguistic]

New favourite example of structural ambiguity: 

Nicole, who never [saw a dog and didn’t smile].  Nicole, who [never saw a dog] and didn’t smile. 

[allthingslinguistic]

Ambiguity strikes again! 

“Caring for your baby since 1890″ from Summer Ray on twitter. 

[thelingspace]

Why do people interpret the same sentence multiple ways? What is it about semantics that leads us to more than one meaning? This week, The Ling Space takes on semantic scope and talks about how the most innocent-seeming words in your sentence are fighting it out to bestow upon you an interpretation where they come out on top, as well as how we avoid being lost in an ambiguous fog all the time.

This is a new kind of topic for us to cover, so we're really looking forward to hearing what people have to say about it! No ambiguity about that. ^_^

[allthingslinguistic]

Quantifier Scope Jokes

From a recent tweet by James Martin: 

A woman gives birth in the UK every 48 seconds. She must be exhausted.

Which reminded me of a recent conversation I had about the surprisingly dangerous skills of deer: 

Every year, somebody's dog gets killed by a deer. It's always the same person. They never learn. You just shouldn't have a Chihuahua in Churchill, Manitoba

Let's go for a slightly simpler sentence to see the two readings: 

Everyone loves someone. 

This has two possible readings: 

1. For all people, each person has some person that they love (but it might not be the same one). 2. There is some particular person who everyone loves. 

In the first reading, we interpret the "every" as having scope over over the "some" (for every...there is some...) while in the second reading, we interpret the "some" as having scope over the "every" (there is some...who every...). Or in more simplified notation: 

1. EVERY > SOME 2. SOME > EVERY

Back to the original sentences, which also have the same two readings. I'm going to paraphrase them to make it more obvious. 

Some woman gives birth every 48 seconds. 

1. EVERY > SOME: For every period of 48 seconds, there is some woman who gives birth (not necessarily the same one).  2. SOME > EVERY: For some particular woman, she gives birth every 48 seconds. 

Every year, some dog gets killed by a deer. 

1. EVERY > SOME: In every year, there is some dog who gets killed by a deer (not necessarily the same one).  2. SOME > EVERY: For some particular dog, it gets killed every year. 

However, notice that it doesn't matter what the linear order is between them: in the giving-birth example, SOME comes before EVERY, while in the deer example, EVERY comes before SOME. But in both cases, both readings are available (one of them is a highly implausible scenario in real life, but that's where the humour comes from).

Words like "every" and "some" (also a/an, each, a few, all, etc.) are known as quantifiers, and this phenomenon as a whole is known as quantifier scope ambiguity (or more generally just scopal ambiguity) and has gotten quite a lot of attention in semantics. A full explanation of the various proposals is beyond the scope (hm) of this post, but one popular approach is covert quantifier raising. 

[allthingslinguistic]

I hope that the next page says that ∀ can be pronounced by pronouncing A while standing on your head. 

A classic example of scope ambiguity with existential and universal quantifiers is the sentence:

Everyone loves someone. 

This sentence has two meanings, depending on how you order the quantifiers: 

For all people, there exists someone who those people love (which may or may not be the same person).

There exists someone who all people love (everyone loves this one person). 

Or, using the symbols: 

∀x ∃y such that x loves y. 

∃y ∀x such that x loves y.