词义不确定性面面观

语言的各个层面上均存在着不确定性.歧义与笼统、模糊和非典型各自描述词汇语义学所研究的不确定性,它们相关而相异,常常被人们混淆而误用.因此,有必要对这些特性进行仔细观察和重新定义,并分析其成因,使之范围明确,各司其职,有利于进一步开展研究.

Aspects of Lexical Indeterminacy

Indeterminacy exists at every level of linguistic analysis. Ambiguity and vagueness, and fuzziness and atypicality describe aspects of lexical indeterminacy studied in lexical semantics. Related but different, these qualities are often confused and hence misused. For the sake of further study, they are closely re examined in the present paper. Ambiguity is the co existence of two or more senses in a linguistic form. It can be further analyzed into polysemy and homonymy. It is believed that the former is synchronically considered the rule and the latter the exception. A word is considered vague if and only if it and some other words are in hyponymy and the latter words are its hyponyms. This definition distinguishes itself as a technical term from the loose use of the word "vagueness" in rhetoric, and it redresses the confusion and sets limits by asserting that cross linguistic evidence cannot be applied to determine the vagueness of a word. Fuzziness is the quality a word has when it and its co hyponym(s) have unclear boundary. Fuzziness exists in two types of words: one type with objectively recognized core in a continuum and the other with subjectively perceived core in a continuum. By contrast, atypicality describes a word with dubious inclusion relation with a possible super ordinate word. Conceptually, fuzziness and atypicality are caused by incomplete generality and, linguistically, by discreteness, a designing feature of language. It is obvious that ambiguity and vagueness are related to the intra linguistic sense, whereas fuzziness and atypicality are connected with the extra linguistic denotation.