LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 14:1 January 2014
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Resolution of Lexical Ambiguity in Tamil

S. Rajendran, Ph.D.

1. Introduction

Language is burdened with ambiguity; a single utterance can have a number of interpretations or meanings. The native speakers who speak a natural language have an implicit knowledge or competence to understand correctly these ambiguous utterances. They are capable of assigning an interpretation to any of the utterances they generate. They not only assign an interpretation to every utterance in their language, but also know that there are utterances that may have more than one semantic interpretation. These utterances are usually referred to as ambiguous utterances. When an utterance has more than one interpretation, it is usually referred to as ambiguous. Ambiguity means that utterances have same form but have different interpretations. Ambiguity may result from two homonyms/homographs occurring in the same structural position, as in the following example.

1. avan kaal pakutiyaic caappiTTaan
‘He ate quarter of something’/’He ate the leg part of something’

The sentence is ambiguous as the word kaal can mean ‘quarter of’ or ‘leg’. It may also occur when constituents in larger structures have more than one interpretation according to their internal structure and syntactic position.

2. veLLai maruntu kuppi
‘medicine bottle which is white in colour/a bottle with white medicine’

The sentence is ambiguous because the word veLLai ‘white’ can attribute either maruntu ‘medicine’ or kuppi ‘bottle’ The first one is called lexical ambiguity and the second structural ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity refers to the type of ambiguity those results from the occurrence of homonyms/homographs. Let us look at a few lexical ambiguity resolutions taking Tamil as the target language.

2 Lexical Ambiguities

The lexical ambiguity is a very common type of ambiguity. It includes, for example, the nouns such as paTi ‘step (of a stair)’/ ‘a kind of measure’, kuTi ‘drinking habit’/ ‘people’, maTam ‘foolishness’/ ‘mutt’ , etc, verbs such as piTi ‘catch’ / ‘to like’ , kaTi ‘bite’/ ‘to rebuke’ , muTi ‘to knot’/ ‘to finish’, paTu ‘to lie down’/ ‘to suffer’, etc and the adjectives such as virinta ‘wide’/ ‘that which has blossomed’, kuRainta ‘less’/ ‘that which has reduced’, veLutta ‘white’/ ‘that which has become white’, kaRutta ‘black’/ ‘that which has become black’, etc. There are tests for establishing lexical ambiguity. One of the tests is, for example, for the word kaTinamaana there are two opposite words, metuvaana and eLitaana. Consider the following example,

3a. kaTinamaana miTTaayaik kaTikka mutiyaatu
‘You cannot bite a hard sweet’

3b. kaTinamana collukkup poruL kuuRa iyalaatu
‘You cannot give meaning to a hard word’

The reason for this ambiguity is that the word has more than one meaning. But it is not clear when there is only one word involved in ambiguity. Though the noun paTi ‘a measure’ and the verb paTi ‘to study’ have same spelling/pronunciation they are two different words. They are examples of homophones/homographs. One may wonder whether the noun kaTi and the verb kaTi are examples for homonyms/homographs or not. Doubt may arise whether the word mutal in mutal maaNavan ‘first student’ and aintu mutal ‘from five’ are one and the same or not. To tell that one shows lexical ambiguity and the other homonymy/homography is not correct for all. This may be accidental.

There are three basic types in lexical ambiguity: category ambiguity, ambiguity due to homography and ambiguity due to ploysemy.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. S. Rajendran
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Computational Engineering and Networking
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Ettimadai
Coimbatore 641105
Tamilnadu
India
raj_ushush@yahoo.com
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