Last year, the Associated Press sent out this headline.
Now, I was working in a newspaper’s office that week -- I know, newspapers still exist,
it’s weird -- and so everyone around me was pretty much plugged directly into Twitter,
and the reaction was astonishing. Flight 17 had gone down only a week earlier, the idea
that another plane, one carrying bodies from that disaster, could also have crashed? It
seemed unreal.
And it was.
Because what the Associated Press actually meant was: Dutch military plane, COMMA, carrying
bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash, COMMA, lands in Eindhoven.
Now there were many problems with that message, not least the fact that a plane landing uneventfully
is not breaking news, but it’s also a great example of how ambiguous English can be. The
result is called a “crash blossom”, after this particularly ambiguous headline from
a few years ago.
Ambiguity is when you have a word or sentence that can mean two different things. All languages,
except for some incredibly pedantic constructed ones, have ambiguity. Now we’ll set aside
for a moment pragmatic ambiguity, which is when you raise your hand in class and say
“oh, can I go to the toilet?” and some smart-arse of a teacher replies “I don’t
know, can you?” [DRUM STING]
Leaving that aside, English has scopal, lexical and structural ambiguity.
Scopal ambiguity is when you have two or more quantifiers in a sentence, and the order in
which they’re applied isn’t clear. “Everybody loves somebody” is the canonical example:
it can mean that for every person, there is someone that they love -- or it can mean that
there’s a single somebody that’s loved by everyone. It’s like the old joke, “In
the UK, a woman gives birth every 30 seconds. She must be exhausted.” [DRUM STING]
Lexical ambiguity is when you’ve got a word that can mean multiple things. You might have
heard the famous sentence, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”...
...but my favourite one is from the opening chapters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy, where hyperspace travel is described as “unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so wrong about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.” [DRUM STING]
Mind you, that’s not just lexical: that change in meaning also changes the structure
of the sentence.
And that’s the most interesting kind of ambiguity: structural ambiguity, which is
what we started with. Let’s have a look at that “crash blossom” sentence.
JAL is Japan Airlines, by the way, but let’s take that out to make the sentence a bit simpler.
Okay. Let’s diagram this sentence. If you’re American, you might actually have been taught
how to do this in school, for some bizarre reason. This shows you how it was intended.
And presumably the headline writer, having come up with it, didn’t see it any other
way. Most readers, though, saw this. Why?
There are eye tracking studies, watching how people read and re-read a sentence, that show
that we build the interpretation of a sentence in our head as we read it. As we scan left
to right -- in English, anyway -- as we scan left to right, our brain tries to assemble
concepts out of the words it’s seeing. So: Violinist linked to crash… yep, okay…
what’s the next word?
If it were “recovers”, then that’s clearly a verb. It must apply to the violinist, so
our brain settles on that one really quickly. If it were “site”, then that’s clearly
a noun, it must be part of the noun phrase “crash site”, our brain settles on that
quickly.
“Blossoms”, though. That can be a verb, sure, but it can also be a noun. There’s
no clear link, and, heck, it’s physically closer to ‘crash’ than ‘violinist’,
so most people, it seems, come up with “crash blossoms” and then go “wait, what”?
And that brings us to these wonderful constructions called garden path sentences. They’re called
that because they lead you up the garden path, they trick you, they send you down a false
trail.
Garden path sentences solve the question of whether we take a whole sentence into memory
before trying to comprehend it, or whether we build its structure as we go along. We
must do it piece by piece: if you waited to see the whole thing before working it out
as a big block, then you wouldn't get confused.
For more complicated garden path sentences, like this lovely one -- go ahead, take a second,
I’d spoil it with intonation if I read it out loud -- eye tracking studies mean we can
watch people jump back to earlier points in the sentence and scan around, while their
brain tries to work out what it’s been shown.
Generally, ambiguity is something to be avoided in everyday communication. Sure, it’s the
foundation of countless jokes, and very occasionally legal loopholes, but if you’re just trying
to be understood, well, it’s probably not going to help you out.
But linguists can love ambiguity more than most people.
More than most -- more than most people. More than…
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