Latest revision as of 04:28, 5 March 2025

Taxonomy of Structural Ambiguity in Humour With Reference To Translation Google 'class ambiguity'

It is found
that there are many
ambiguity devices used in creating humorous effects in jokes
and other humorous texts. These devices include the use of
articles in plural and non-count nouns , coordinating
conjunctions , the construction ' a little ' , devices 
affecting verbforms such as modals and tense shifting , 
in addition to other devices such as verb particles , idioms ...etc.

Ambiguity makes riddle, and linguistic humor possible. I will steal a taxonomy from Stageberg's excellent observations and extend them as we discover forms of ambiguity in Hebrew. Ambiguity is when there are two or more meanings.

Ambiguity

lexical

"Lexical ambiguity occurs when two or more meanings of a single word or expression are applicable in a given context...Lexical ambiguity, then, derives from the meanings of words, not from their structures."

Lexical-dictionary

אמר means both 'said' or 'word' and 'lamb'. When God said: Let there be light, he created light by the lamb.

Lexical-metaphor. The word is used as a metaphor causing ambiguity between the dictionary meaning and the metaphor.

אור literally means light, but is a metaphor for holiness.

structural

"Structural ambiguity stems from the grammar of the language, not from the different meaning of individual words"

syntactic ambiguity

"Syntactic ambiguity occurs when the arrangement of words in a grammatical structure permits two or more meanings to emerge."

adjective+noun+noun

present or past participle + noun

a separable two-part verb or as a verb + preposition

class

"This occurs when a word can be classified as more than one part of speech in a given context."

vocal

"The term vocal refers to the stresses, pitches, and pauses by means of which the human voice can control meanings and distinguish one meaning from another. "

contextual

When the context is changed, ambiguity is made possible

change in voice

change in time

change in presumed context

ambiguous cause and effect

pseudo-ambiguity (pun)

the use of a wrong word, permitting two interpretations—that of the word intended and that of the wrong word.