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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The word 'light' is ambiguous (or polysemous) between 'not dark' and 'not heavy'

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Zeugmatic infelicity can arise from pragmatic incongruity between predications rather than semantic ambiguity in the predicate itself.
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    • 2.A single unified meaning of 'light' (e.g., 'low on a relevant scale') applied to different dimensions produces zeugma via contextual clash, not lexical ambiguity.
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    • 3.Grice's cooperative maxims predict that conjoining radically different subject-predicate pairs violates relevance, generating zeugmatic oddness independently of polysemy.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Pustejovsky's generative lexicon theory holds that words like 'light' have a single underspecified semantic entry whose sense is completed by conceptual co-composition with context.
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    • 2.If apparent polysemy is the product of systematic, rule-governed sense modulation rather than stored discrete meanings, then 'light' is not ambiguous but semantically flexible.
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    • 3.The zeugma test conflates genuine ambiguity with the pragmatic cost of forcing a reader to simultaneously activate two contextually resolved readings of one meaning.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Conjunction reduction of 'The colours are light' and 'The feathers are light' into 'The colours and the feathers are light' produces a zeugmatic sentence
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    • 2.Zeugma in conjunction-reduced sentences is evidence of ambiguity or polysemy
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