To Put a Certain End to Lexical Ambiguity

It is maintained that too much credence has been accorded the idea of lexical ambiguity in semantics, & that words that are ambiguous in theory are not so in real situations. Three views of ambiguity are examined: (1) J. J. Katz & J. A. Fodor's (1963) theory of selective restrictions, which is maintained to be somewhat useful but incomplete, (2) the division between homonymy & polysemy in the structural model proposed by H. Geckeler (1976), lauded as providing the best foundation for treating ambiguity, & (3) solutions advanced by John Lyons (1981) & R. Kempson (1977), critiqued for being based on variable criteria & for their failure to explain every case. It is concluded that ambiguity is rarely encountered in actual practice, words being disambiguated by linguistic, extralinguistic, or psychological factors. The success of actual listeners & readers in comprehending words that are theoretically ambiguous is explained primarily by the efficiency of the spreading activation model of semantic memory, in which the components of the senses of words are parts of a semantic network, the properties of a concept being unequal, differing in accessibility. Complementary to the selective restrictions of J. J. Katz (1972), a system of semantic priority to account for the psychological factors relating to ambiguity is advanced. 23 References. Adapted from the source document