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It is not the case that Ambiguity plays a more central and widespread role in sentence, utterance, and discourse interpretation than previously assumed.
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Reasons For
2 perspectives
Reason for 1 of 2
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1.
Grice's Razor (a parsimony principle) favors positing pragmatic inference over lexical ambiguity when a unified semantic entry suffices.
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2.
Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory demonstrates that a single literal meaning plus contextual inference explains the same data Lepore and Stone attribute to disambiguation.
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3.
Multiplying lexical ambiguities to explain interpretive variation violates the methodological constraint that semantic theory should minimize unmotivated homonymy.
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Reason for 2 of 2
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1.
Stanley and Szabó's (2000) framework shows that apparent ambiguity often reflects context-sensitive variable saturation within a stable, univocal logical form.
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2.
If syntactically covert variables rather than multiple lexical entries account for interpretive flexibility, then the scope of genuine ambiguity does not expand but remains narrow.
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Reasons Against
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Reason against
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1.
Lepore and Stone (2016) deploy disambiguation systematically across a range of interpretive phenomena.
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2.
If disambiguation is operative in many cases thought to involve context sensitivity or implicature, then ambiguity is more pervasive than standard accounts acknowledge.
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